


Let it Out

by xxxraquelita



Category: Glee
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-18
Updated: 2013-03-18
Packaged: 2017-11-29 16:42:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 43,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/689164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xxxraquelita/pseuds/xxxraquelita
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mundane wasn't exactly Kurt Hummel's style, but it had become his milieu. Somehow he'd gotten into a pattern of nothing but work, and not even with a job that he liked or wanted. It was difficult to break the cycle when it was just the background of his life, but a push at the right time shifted everything into perspective.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

Working at desk job was a mindless existence, but it paid the bills. That’s what Kurt Hummel told himself to get through every day. He’d had such dreams all through high school and college, about how he was going to make it out on his own, do what he loved to do and succeed in life in spite of all the people telling him he couldn’t. 

 

Except real life was a bitch, and making rent was higher on the list of priorities than dreaming. 

 

He tried not to be bitter about it, because it was what all or most people went through as they transitioned into adulthood. Having a job was truly something to be thankful for, and he tried not to think about how much he’d rather be doing almost anything else than what he was. With the economy the way it was, he was grateful every day that he had a place to go and earn a paycheck, that he could keep his apartment and manage to put food on his plate. There were a lot worse jobs that he could be doing, and at least manual labor was out. 

 

It was just that it seemed so never-ending. Every morning he walked the same path from the elevator to his cubicle, sat down in his chair that was probably close to the end of its office life, and started in on a pile of work that never ended. He wasn’t making up that it never ended either, because as soon as he finished one task, two more would replace it. It was cyclical, a mindless repetition of entry-level work that was numbing and only ever interrupted by the occasional phone call from someone asking for information he couldn’t legally provide. 

 

Kurt wondered what it said about him that sometimes, he liked when people lost their cool at him. It was definitely the most exciting thing that ever happened to him at work, and he knew  _he_ wasn’t actually the cause so he never took it personally. It was the only thing that broke the monotony of staring at a computer screen and time flying past faster than he realized. At least that was a good thing about it all – hours felt like minutes when new things to do popped up on his screen automatically. Lunchtime came fast, the end of the day faster, and before he knew it he would be back on the subway headed home.

 

It made days feel wasted, how fast time went by and he had nothing to show for it. Day after day of waking up, fueling himself with enough coffee to get through work, and then getting home to settle in with whatever was recorded on his DVR from the night before and a dinner for one. It was ridiculous how much days of doing nothing were able to be exhausting. Kurt blamed the screens he stared at for eight hours a day. No matter what it was, it definitely wasn’t how he’d seen himself spending his life after college. 

 

There were so many people that asked him what he’d expected to be able to do with a degree in fine arts.  _Art_  had always been his response, usually drawled out sarcastically or snapped at them if he was in a particular mood. He wouldn’t have gone to school for it if he hadn’t had every intention of carrying on with it afterward. It was just that life had gotten in the way, and drawing and creating didn’t put money in his bank account. He hated being such a slave to it, but it made the world go around and it was kind of difficult to try and live without it. 

 

It was another day, another dollar, as Kurt rode the subway in to work. Mondays were the worst, though he guessed that was probably true for anyone in any job. Even if nothing happened to distinguish it from any other day – Mondays were always the worst. He rode the elevator up to his floor, same as usual, sat at his desk and logged in, same as usual, took a sip of coffee to steel himself for the hours of same old same old, and got to work. And for an hour or so, that was exactly all he did – until a text box popped up on his computer.

 

 _User TCOCHA is requesting access to remotely control your computer. Yes or No._  

 

It wasn’t  _that_ unusual to have happen. Kurt had let his computer be remotely controlled many times before, though usually it was because of a technical problem he was having and it was by an IT person who he was on the phone with while it was happening. That was what gave him pause and made him hesitate with his curser hovering over the ‘No’ option. He had no idea  _why_ it was happening, or who TCOCHA was. Then again, he didn’t exactly know that many of his coworkers. Everyone sitting at their desks with their backs to the entrances of their cubicles didn’t exactly lend to camaraderie among the ranks. He definitely didn’t know all the people in IT, who were the only people he was aware of who had the ability to remotely control anything. 

 

Thinking that maybe he’d missed an email about maintenance, or updates, or  _something_ , he moved his curser and clicked ‘Yes.’

 

Watching his computer work seemingly of its own accord was always a bizarre experience. Kurt watched transfixed as the arrow moved around the screen, his hand still on the mouse but unmoving, clicking on the taskbar to open a new document. The blank page sat that way for a few seconds, cursor blinking at the top left corner, before words started appearing.

 

**Hello, Kurt Hummel.**

 

Kurt blinked, staring at the screen for a moment before glancing behind him to try and see if anything weird was happening to the computers in any of the cubicles he could see. There wasn’t. It definitely wasn’t something that had happened any of the other times someone had been in control of his computer.

 

**The mundane doesn’t exactly seem like your style. You should leave and go to the following address, see what your life could be if you let it.**

 

**Take a chance.**

Kurt felt like he was in a movie, watching the address get typed beneath those three words, because who did that kind of thing happen to in real life? He was basically being told to follow the white rabbit, but given an address instead of a person to tail. It sent a thrill through him for a brief moment, something that he hadn’t felt in who knows how long and especially not at work. There was that potential of the unknown. 

 

His hand twitched on the mouse and the arrow on the screen moved – TCOCHA was gone.

 

Kurt stared at the document pulled up on his screen for a long moment before hitting the print button, minimizing it before going to the communal printer to collect the page before anyone else saw it. He wasn’t a complete idiot, about to follow directions given to him by someone on his computer without a second thought to what possibly might happen. It was New York City, and his first thought was that he was being lured into a horrible trap that would end in him being dead in some abandoned warehouse somewhere. 

 

Google maps was his friend, and he quickly pulled up the address and put it on street view. It didn’t  _completely_ look like it was a place for people to go and get murdered, but one could never tell in New York. He couldn’t believe he was seriously considering it, getting up and walking out of work to go off and meet the unknown. It had to be at least slightly fine, he convinced himself, because TCOCHA was a legitimate userID on their system, which meant they worked there and had the authority to access other people’s computers. He couldn’t imagine anyone working at that company, as dull and straight laced as it was, to nefariously be picking people off one by one by those means and managing to go unnoticed. Besides, he had mace in his coat pocket.

 

 _Take a chance_. 

 

It was a testament to how much Kurt hated what his life had become that he emailed his boss that he was sick, closed out of everything on his computer, and left. His heart was racing as he rode the elevator down to the ground level and walked out the front door of the building, into the noisy hustle and bustle of the city. The paper with the address was folded and tucked in his pocket, the number and street practically ingrained in his mind with how many times he’d read it over again, his phone giving him directions on which lines of the subway to take to get to a part of Brooklyn he’d never been before. 

 

Riding the subway gave him enough time to think about what he was doing, and panic a little. What was he  _doing?_ He felt like an idiot when he tried to answer that question, because the simple answer was that he was listening to random people in his computer. That would never hold water if anyone asked. Really though, he was trying to feel alive again. He was trying to feel like he was _doing_ something with his life and TCOCHA had known just how to get to him by saying the words he’d wanted and needed.  _See what your life could be if you let it_. 

 

If he  _did_ end up dead, Kurt thought, at least he’d have done so on an adventure and not from boredom. 

 

His heart raced as he climbed the stairs from the subway, scrolling through the rest of the directions on his phone as he clutched the mace in his pocket with the other. Maybe Kurt was more nervous than he wanted to admit, but he’d told himself there was no turning back once he left work. It would have been just as easy to chicken out and go back to his apartment for the day, take it off for his own sake, but what would he have done with it? Nothing. At least this way, he was doing something, and he was determined not to talk himself out of it.

 

The building from the address looked a tad like a warehouse, which didn’t help matters, and Kurt pulled the paper out of his pocket to double check it and make sure he was in the right place. Of course he was. He slid it and his phone back into his pocket, still keeping a grip on his mace, and climbed the few stairs up to the door with the right number on it. Taking a deep breath, he raised his hand and knocked, stepping back slightly to put a little distance between it and himself when it opened. And just a few seconds later, it did.

 

Standing there in front of Kurt was a girl, or rather a woman, who was covered from head to toe in splatters of paint. He blinked as looked at her, unable to stop himself from glancing from her messy looking blonde hair all the way down to her bare feet. It made him realize that he hadn’t even thought about what to expect, other than the potential of something bad, but even if he  _had,_ there was no way he would have come up with that. Her eyes were wide and unblinking when his gaze het hers again, and he didn’t even know what to say. He didn’t even know why he was there.

 

“Are you selling encyclopedias?” she asked, hands clasping and dropping down in front of her as she looked him over. The question both caught him off guard and confused him all at once, and he blinked.

 

“No, I…”

 

“Oh, you look like what I would think someone who sells encyclopedias would wear if they came to my door,” she continued, shrugging slightly and rocking back on her heels. “I never needed them anyway. Encyclopedias, I mean, not salesmen. Otherwise how could I buy anything?”

 

All Kurt could do was stare, because he had no idea how to respond or what to say otherwise. How was he supposed to explain what he was doing there when he didn’t even know that himself? TCOCHA really should have given better instructions than they had about that part. His hand loosened in his pocket as he tried to come up with something, anything, but was interrupted by her speaking again.

 

“Did you want to come in?” She stepped back out of the doorframe, offering him a smile. 

 

“Are you going to try to kill me?” The words came out before he could stop them, and the girl’s eyes widened in response. “Sorry,” he said quickly, holding his hand up and taking a step back. “I didn’t mean it to sound like I thought you were a murderer, but this is all just so strange and—” He broke off as she pressed her palm against his, almost like the most gentle high five known to man but without an end to it. Kurt stared at their hands for a moment before looking back up to her, and she shook her head.

 

“I’m Brittany,” she supplied, pulling her hand away and giving a gentle smile. “You should come in.”

 

“Can I ask you something first?” At her nod, Kurt drew in a breath. It wasn’t the most important question, but one that he felt might help him get some kind of grasp on what was happening. “Why do you have paint all over you?”

 

“Because I was painting,” Brittany replied simply, and with that she turned on her heel and walked further inside, leaving the door open for him to follow.

 

It was much less concerning once Kurt was inside, the door shut behind him, though he wasn’t sure it should have been. He followed Brittany, gaze flickering around to memorize the path he was taking – just in case he needed to find his way out quickly. She may have seemed sweet and harmless, but he was still wary. The good thing was that it looked less daunting on the inside, with little rooms sanctioned off and furniture scattered about. It appeared lived in, comfortable, like it had been made a home for someone a while ago and kept that way. 

 

He glanced around, taking in the way the sunlight was beaming in through the windows and illuminated all the paint that Brittany had dripped onto the floor as she’d trailed the hallways. And then she started to go into one of the rooms and Kurt felt his nerves kick in again, a giant wave of  _what am I doing_  hitting him as he realized that just because he was inside, he still had no idea what was going on. “Wait, I – what  _is_ this?”

 

Brittany turned in the doorway and tilted her head as she looked at him. “I’m not that good at explaining,” she started slowly, worrying her lower lip between her teeth. “I just like answering the door.”

 

“You’re very good at it.” Kurt blinked as another voice spoke up from behind her, and Brittany brightened at the words. He leaned over a little to be able to look past her, seeing a girl sitting on the floor watching them. 

 

“Um well, you do artsy stuff, right?” Brittany asked, bouncing on the balls of her feet. “I mean, I’m guessing you do or you wouldn’t be here! So you can do whatever you want! We have just about anything you would want to do. Paint, clay, pencils, wire… I have some crayons if you really want to use them…”

 

Kurt stared at her, trying to decipher what she meant. It sounded so simple and easy,  _do whatever you want_ , but it was never that simple or easy. Had he seriously left work to sit around in someplace in Brooklyn and doodle his day away? The possibility of how that might have been exactly what had happened sent a bit of a rush through him, but to what end? It was all well and good for the afternoon, he supposed, but it was the afterward that he wasn’t so sure about. He was there, so he might as well.

 

“Pencils?” Kurt requested, and Brittany’s expression lit up. 

 

“I know where those are!” she exclaimed, stepping back out into the corridor and heading for another door. Kurt followed her in, that time, but stopped in the doorway. The room looked like an art supply store, anything he could have thought of stacked on shelves and organized by medium. It was like a heaven for his former life. 

 

“I can use any of this?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at her as she hummed in the affirmative. “What’s the catch?”

 

“Catch? Catch what?” Brittany blinked, and then smiled slowly. “Wait, like playing tag? I don’t know if we should run around in here, we might knock things over.”

 

“No, Brit.” Kurt turned and looked at the girl who had come up behind them, the same one from the other room. She looked vaguely amused. “I don’t think he means like playing tag. He means what’s the catch in coming here and playing with us.”

 

“I’m not going to  _pla_ —”

 

“Look, porcelain, there isn’t a catch,” she continued, slinking past him and the hall, glancing over her shoulder. “You want to draw? Draw. It’s that easy. The room next door is free.”

 

Brittany nodded when he looked to her, and pointed over toward a shelf. “All the pencils are there, and there are sketchbooks and everything around if you look. I have to go back to painting before I forget what it was supposed to be!”

 

Kurt was standing alone before he realized what was happening, just him and a room full of things that had his fingers itching to use them all. It had been too long since he’d done anything remotely artistic, and he wasn’t even sure if he knew how anymore. He crossed to the shelf that Brittany had indicated and looked over everything there, his eyes widening slightly as they fell onto a box of what had been his favorite brand to use before. They looked unopened, and he pulled them off the shelf instantly without bothering to look at anything else, a sketchbook joining them in his hands before he left the room, cautiously peering out before going to next door down.

 

It was an empty space other than worktable and a few chairs, but the walls were bare and everything looked untouched. It was a blank canvas, just like the pages in his hand, and Kurt slid into the chair behind the table as he set everything down and took off his coat, slipping it onto the back of the chair. He undid the top few buttons of his shirt, feeling himself relax as he undid the cuffs as well, rolling them up to keep anything from getting on them. His breath caught as he opened the box of pencils, not wanting the moment to feel important but knowing that it was, really, because this was something he’d essentially abandoned and yearned to do again. 

 

The thing about the room being so blank was that it didn’t give Kurt anything to work with but what was in his head. He picked up one of the pencils, rolling it along his finger as he familiarized himself with the weight of it in his hand, the way it felt pressed between the tip of his thumb and the knuckle of his index finger, resting into the indents that were still there just waiting to be filled. It only took a few strokes against the first page of the sketchbook before Kurt’s shoulders eased back, his eyes closing for a long moment as he searched himself for inspiration, and then when he opened then again he began in earnest.

 

It was a familiar sound, the pencil moving across the page, and Kurt’s eyes focused on the etchings and patterns that flowed from the tip of it as easy as it ever had before. He hadn’t thought about what to draw when he started, but it didn’t surprise him what first came to mind. It was exactly what he saw every day – his desk from work. It was the most common scene for him to see, and it was a good place to start. The format of his desk – the computer, keyboard, phone, various office supplies – were on the page in black and white and shades of gray, before he reached for the actual colors to add to it.

 

Blocks of color formed on the cubicle walls, like a quilt of brightness than made it seem less like a desk jockey prison cell. In reality, the walls of his cubicle were practically blank. There were a few papers pinned up onto them, but all work related and reminders of how to do different operations. There was nothing colorful, nothing personal, nothing that tied him to it. If he were to get up and leave – actually quit, not just get up and leave for the day like he had that day – it wouldn’t take him any time at all to gather his belongings. There was a charger for his cell phone and some headphones in a drawer, a box or two of tea alongside them, and that was it.

 

Kurt lost track of time, unsure of how long he’d been sitting there pouring color into his life. The pages of the sketchbook were starting to fill with the places he spent his time, the settings most familiar to him, with details and decorations added in to make them all seem so much less boring and ordinary. His apartment, brightened with splashes of green and blue, the subway platform he stood on every day complete with yellow highlighting it, the front of his office building scrawled with red, red, and more red. Just because he was making it more interesting to look at didn’t mean he had to treat it nicely. 

 

“Kurt?” An unfamiliar voice broke him out of his thoughts and his hand twitched, scratching a dark line across the page in front of him. He turned to look back toward the doorway and blinked. Standing there was a young man who looked roughly the same age as him, though clearly much more boyish in appearance, and much more casually dressed. Then again, Kurt doubted he’d just come from an office where looking professional was expected and enforced. He looked  _comfortable_ , and there wasn’t really any other way to describe it. Admiring that and the gentle curl to his hair, swept back from his face – his  _gorgeous_ face – didn’t stop Kurt from being slightly unnerved at the fact that the man standing there knew his name, except he figured Brittany could have told him as much.

 

“Who’s asking?” he replied, setting down the pencil in his hand and raising an eyebrow. 

 

“Sorry,” the man continued, taking a few steps into the room and gesturing down to the sketchbook. “I didn’t mean to startle you.” He offered Kurt a smile, and his eyes had such a warm twinkle about them that there was a feeling of ease almost instantly as the man extended his hand. “Blaine.”

 

“Blaine,” Kurt repeated, slipping his hand into Blaine’s and taking in the warmth of his palm as they shook. His hand was soft and smooth, and his fingertips traced gently over Kurt’s fingers as they pulled away. He glanced down at the worktable, the sketchbook, the mark marring what he’d been doing, and he shook his head. “It’s fine, this wasn’t really anything anyway.”

 

“It looks like something,” Blaine replied, moving in to look down at it. “Everything is though.”

 

“I should be going, anyway,” Kurt said, turning back to the worktable and gathering up the pencils scattered across it, carefully putting them back into the case – orderly but used, and he wasn’t sure what the protocol was in that place. He wasn’t planning on taking them with him, because they weren’t his, but was he supposed to put them back in the same place he’d found them now that they weren’t unopened and perfect? He’d just flipped the sketchbook closed when Blaine spoke up again.

 

“What, done taking a chance already?” Kurt immediately felt more on guard. 

 

“Was that you on my computer?”

 

“I’m not nearly tech savvy enough for that,” Blaine replied, shaking his head. He looked nonplussed at the accusation, and decidedly calm about it all. “You don’t have to leave, definitely not on my account. I was just coming to say hi, and welcome, and see if you wanted lunch.”

 

“I should go,” Kurt restated, but he didn’t move from his seat. “This is… it isn’t me.” 

 

Blaine leaned forward, flipping the sketchbook open and thumbing through the pages until he got to the one Kurt had done of his office building, and he tapped on it lightly with his fingertips. “And _this_ is?”

 

“What  _is_ this?” Kurt asked quietly, gaze moving from the page, trailing up Blaine’s arm with his pushed up shirt sleeves until he got to his face. Blaine bit his lip, like he was trying not to grin, and let his hand drop from the book. 

 

“Let’s get lunch,” he said simply, readjusting the strap on the bag over his shoulder as he rocked back on his heels a step, giving Kurt a soft smile. “I’m fully capable of answering questions, but I’m alsohungry and would prefer to do so while eating something. There’s a great little place just up the street…”

 

Kurt didn’t move, looking up at him unblinkingly until Blaine sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “Blaine Anderson. That’s my full name. I have never in my life been arrested, or done anything that would  _get_ me arrested, at least as far as I’m aware. This isn’t a trick, it isn’t a trap, it’s just… life. It’s living. I am  _very_ hungry, Kurt, will you  _please_ come have lunch with me?”

 

Slowly, Kurt got to his feet and rolled down the cuffs of his shirt, pulling his coat off the back of the chair and sliding it on. Putting it on was a friendly reminder that at least he still had mace in his pocket and absolutely no hesitation to use it, should the circumstances call for it. Not that Blaine needed to know that – Blaine, who was smiling as he watched Kurt get ready to go with him. “You can take that,” Blaine said as Kurt stepped away from the table, nodding to the sketchbook. “I mean, I would say you could leave it for later but if you don’t come back that wouldn’t work.”

 

Kurt hadn’t quite thought about the potential of there being more days like that, more days of sitting and drawing instead of sitting and typing. He supposed he hadn’t thought about what to do with the book, as much as he hadn’t known what to do with the pencils. Reaching down, he turned the cover shut again and picked it up, keeping it in his hand as they moved through the hallways back to the front door he’d come in, and Blaine shucked his shirt sleeves down his arms as they headed outside into the mid-day sun. 

 

When Blaine said the restaurant was just up the street, he hadn’t been lying. They’d barely gone a block before he was turning in under and awning and holding the door open for Kurt to go inside. A table was cleared off for them and Kurt slid into a seat, instantly looking over the menu for something to do to distract from the uneasy feeling he still had about it all. He settled on a sandwich, something plain and that didn’t require much thought, and they ordered their food with their drinks. Not much was said before the menus were taken away, but then Blaine folded his hands on the table and looked across it at him.

 

“Alright, well I guess I should preface everything by saying that there’s no way for some of this not to sound… I don’t want to say  _creepy_ but I guess there isn’t a better word,” Blaine began, his voice quiet but soothing despite what he was saying. “I swear it’s  _not_ creepy. But to clear the air and get it out of the way first thing, I know your name is Kurt Hummel, that you graduated college with a degree in fine arts, and I know where you work. Well, and anything that was on your resume but it’s not like I  _memorized_  it or anything…”

 

“How do you know that?” Kurt asked, sitting back in his chair to put a little more distance between him and Blaine. “Why would you have my resume – you’re right, this all sounds creepy.”

 

“Well, the internet,” Blaine offered with a little shrug. “And I’m sorry for how it sounds. Kurt, are you happy?”

 

“Yes,” Kurt replied automatically, the sudden question catching him off guard, before amending himself. “Not at this exact moment because I’m kind of freaked out, if I’m being honest, but…”

 

“You are? Really?” Blaine’s eyebrows rose pointedly and he looked unconvinced. “You’re happy with your life, what you’re doing with it and how you live it? You’re satisfied at the end of the day? Then Kurt, why did you come?”

 

Kurt drew in a breath. Blaine’s eyes were looking straight up into his, all dark honey colored and earnest. He was disarming, and Kurt wondered if he knew just how much. Somehow Blaine knew exactly what questions to ask to cut straight through to the core, to what would get Kurt the most. Of course he wasn’t happy, that was just the kneejerk response he gave anytime someone asked, because who actually wanted to hear the truth? That was the question, though, wasn’t it? Why had he gone? He didn’t even know, though he didn’t know how he was expected to when he didn’t even know what it was.

 

“No,” he murmured in response, and then the words he never admitted to anyone but himself slipped out. “I’m not. I feel like all I do is waste my time, every day.”

 

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Blaine replied, and he sounded sincere. “That’s never a good way to feel. Why don’t you do something else instead?”

 

“Because I like being able to keep a roof over my head.” Kurt pursed his lips, trying to rein in a bit more control of the conversation. “I want to know what’s going on. Why do you know all that about me?”

 

“Here, let me even the playing field,” Blaine replied, looking nonplussed about it all. “You know my name, I graduated with a double major of musical theatre and art, and you’ve already been where I work – so technically you have a leg up on me now. I mean, I don’t carry around copies of my resume but I’m sure I could find it for you at some point if you really wanted.”

 

“Blaine…”

 

“Have you ever heard of Synergy?” Blaine asked as he leaned forward against the table, quirking an eyebrow at him. Kurt paused before giving a slight nod. Just because he wasn’t working in art didn’t mean he didn’t try to keep up with it. He’d had get rid of most of his magazine subscriptions to keep money aside for food and rent, but Synergy had come around and he hadn’t been able to cut it. Maybe it was because it was New York based, or the fact that it was all done anonymously, but it had intrigued him. “Welcome.”

 

“Wait,” he stammered, eyes a little wide as he looked over at Blaine. “You— _that_  is Synergy?  _How?_ ”

 

“It’s kind of ridiculous, really,” Blaine replied, shaking his head. “I got a call from a friend I’d made in college. Her father wanted artwork for his buildings and she’d somehow convinced him that if he went with unknown artists he could get more prestige than if he got the same classic prints as everyone else – because no one else would have what he did. She called me because I’d used her as a model in one of my photography projects and her father had liked the pictures, and she figured I would know other people that would be able to contribute. I was doing some workshop for a show that wasn’t going anywhere, my boyfriend had just broken up with me, and I really didn’t have anything to lose or a reason to say no…”

 

Kurt couldn’t do much but stare. It wasn’t as though he’d given much thought to Synergy, how it worked or what it would be like, but if he had he never would have considered it being some _warehouse in Brooklyn_  where it seemed like people just came and went. Everything that had been published by them had looked streamlined and professional, and his mind was having trouble making the connection between paint-covered Brittany and the artwork he’d seen printed. If their drinks hadn’t been brought over, he was certain he would have just kept staring. As it was, he grabbed his glass and took a sip to give himself something else to do as Blaine went on.

 

“Anyway, I got in touch with a few people from college who I knew were as stuck as I was, and they reached out to others,” he continued, absently stirring his drink with the straw. “It hasn’t been the same group always, and a bunch of the people who were there at the beginning aren’t anymore. Once it started shifting like that, I kind of wanted to try something different. All I’ve ever wanted to do with my life is make art and help people, and so that’s what I tried to do.

 

“I started looking for people who were stuck in jobs where they shouldn’t be. Like you.” Blaine’s gaze flickered up from his drink to meet Kurt’s. “People with such creative talent shouldn’t be stuck behind a desk where they aren’t allowed to flourish. It’s stifling and repressive and I can’t imagine feeling that contained, that unable to express myself in the ways that I want. I was given this incredible opportunity and I wanted to share it with people who seemed to need it most, so that’s why we started looking into corporations and who worked there, finding the people with the background and doing a little research on them before trying to bring them in. That’s why I knew things about you already –  _not_ to be creepy.”

 

“Research.” Kurt said the word as if it were rolling over his tongue, his gaze not wavering from how it was locked on Blaine.

 

“Right, research. Nothing crazy just… seeing what’s out there. Online portfolios, examples from exhibits in college.” Blaine shrugged and swirled the straw around in his glass. “We like to know what we’re looking into. It’s not like we can just have anyone come in – there’s a certain standard of quality we have to maintain. It wouldn’t be that big a deal if we weren’t putting our work in a specific facility, or the publication, but everything snowballed so quickly and that means there’s a standard that has to be met. I don’t like wasting anyone’s time.”

 

Kurt started to open his mouth to respond but was interrupted by their food arriving. He ate almost mechanically, going through the motions and not paying attention. His mind was too distracted processing everything that Blaine had said to register the way the ingredients on his sandwich blended together so perfectly and deliciously, something that he would have appreciated any other day of the week. He hadn’t thought of art as a viable option in his life for years, and definitely never expected anyone to consider what he had done as good enough to be involved in a group and publication he had admired from afar. That might have been what was keeping it from clicking into place in his head more than anything else.

 

At least Blaine seemed content for the conversation to pause while they ate, because he didn’t say a word the entire time. He  _had_ said that he was hungry and that was the whole reason they were there, so Kurt supposed he wasn’t surprised at the way the man sitting across from him just dove into his food – he drew the line at thinking that he was  _wolfing_ it down because he was actually eating it fairly primly, just without any hesitation between bites and seemingly all focus on the plate in front of him. Kurt felt like he should have been a little more concerned about the fact that this stranger, or maybe even multiple strangers, knew so much about him without him actually volunteering the information, but he wasn’t. It was in the back of his mind, sure, but not enough that he wanted to run.

 

 

“I can’t quit my job,” he said quietly, once his sandwich was gone and Blaine’s plate was near empty. His fingers traced along the edge of his napkin and he shook his head. Not on a whim, not because a stranger liked artwork that he’d produced a few years prior, and definitely not without some other plan in place for how to make rent. Kurt wasn’t the type to leap without looking, despite the fact that he’d gone there that day and taken that chance. A day of adventure and giving into himself was one thing, but giving up what he knew and the safety and security therein was completely another.

 

“Okay,” Blaine replied, taking a sip of his water and giving a small nod. Kurt had expected some resistance, he supposed, maybe an attempt at convincing him otherwise, but Blaine looked nonplussed. “So you’re not interested at all?”

 

“No, I am,” Kurt corrected. He wasn’t sure if there was a way to explain just how interested he actually was with the thought of being able to just sit around all day and draw, paint,  _whatever_  he wanted. That was the life, that was the  _dream_ , but it was like a fairy tale – perfect and wonderful to think about but so far from anything real. “It’s just… a lot to take in.”

 

“Of course.” Blaine glanced up as the server stopped by again to drop off their check, his wallet out and card slipped in with it before Kurt even had a chance to reach for his own. “I get that.”

 

“So you realize just how insane all of this is?” Kurt asked, unable to help himself. Blaine just chuckled, a warm sound that was only enhanced by the soft smile playing at his lips as he looked over at Kurt.

 

“Oh, I spend every day trying to figure out how it happened,” he replied, shaking his head with another laugh. “Believe me, I realize.” He paused as if going over something in his head, his gaze flickering down to the table before back up to meet Kurt’s. “You’re very talented, Kurt. I’m not trying to tell you to quit your job, I would never presume… but if you ever have a free weekend, you’re more than welcome to stop by. You know where we are, and I would love to see what you can do.”

 

The train ride back into the city, to his apartment, all Kurt could do was think about what Blaine had said. It echoed in his head,  _you’re very talented, Kurt_ , and  _I would love to see what you can do_. It was crazy to consider, but it wasn’t nearly as ridiculous as quitting his job outright. He kept opening the sketchbook he’d taken, fingers tracing over what he’d drawn that afternoon, and he’d just spent a good few minutes staring at one of his drawings when it was right there in front of him but far more drab and dull than he’d made it on paper – his subway platform.

 

His apartment was the same when he got there, boring and lifeless compared to the sketch in his hand where color was thrown onto the walls with reckless abandon. Kurt set the sketchbook on his bed as he took off his work clothes, still open to the page of his apartment and his eyes studying it as he changed into something more comfortable. His fingers ached for more already, to be holding the smooth wood of pencils and making something appear out of the blankness of a page. There were more pressing matters at hand than digging into the back of his closet to find what he might have had tucked away to do just that, so he shut the book and left it for another time.

 

Kurt spent his night sitting in his armchair, which was far too big for the tininess of his apartment but too comfortable to get rid of for something more practical, a glass of wine in his hand and a stack of Synergy magazines next to him. He’d looked at them all before, seen every page and piece therein, but it felt different to be doing so after seeing behind the operation. His eyes took in each detail as if it were the first time, looking for hints or clues as to who the artist had been. There were no names attached to any of it, and he knew Blaine had said that artists came and went, but Kurt felt like he should have been able to see them reflected in their art – the ones he’d met.

 

By the time he fell asleep, still in his chair and with magazines spread out around him, Kurt had all but talked himself into going back on the weekend and giving himself another chance.

 


	2. Chapter Two

It was like a habit that Kurt couldn’t shake, after that. He’d been ignoring it for so long, the yearn and want to  _create_ , and that one day he’d spent giving into his curiosity had flipped a switch somewhere inside him that put it at the forefront of his mind.  
  
Work was still boring, still mindless and dull. It wasn’t as though he had the ability to do as he pleased while he was stuck behind a desk, staring at a computer screen for hours on end and with quotas to meet. Quantity and quality were important, but at the time they were focused more on quantity to keep the department from becoming swamped with undone tasks. His fingers were constantly at his keyboard, the click-clack of typing only drowned out by the music he listened to almost non-stop through his headphones. That was the only way to keep from feeling completely stifled, to have that melodic reminder that there was something more out there than just computer screens that made his eyes feel blurry and the constant list of things being done.  
  
There  _were_ moments of reprieve. It was the same moment that Kurt had to take off his headphones and give into the white noise of the office due to his phone ringing. It was the only time during his day that his hands abandoned their place on the keyboard and shifted to a pen and paper, ready to take down whatever information the person on the other end of the phone had to offer him. At least, that was how it was before.  
  
The thing was, the people on the phone tended to tell him way more than was ever helpful and expected more from him than he would ever be able to give. That led to so many minutes on the phone, just sitting and waiting for them to stop so he could tell them what he could and try to get them to hang up. It was a waste of time – or at least that’s how he’d always felt about it before. He used to just sit and wait, albeit impatiently, knowing how much he had to do and how little time it would take to answer their questions if they would just give him a chance instead of rambling on. But that was before.  
  
Every time his phone rang, the motions were fluid and the same. He’d stretch to reach the receiver with one hand while pausing his music and pulling off his headphones with the other. By the time the phone reached his ear and propped against his shoulder, his hands would have moved to grab the pen and pad of paper sitting off to the side. It was usually covered in numbers and names, each one a different call and with a line drawn under so he could just keep using the same piece of paper until it was full. At least, that’s how it’d been before.  
  
Now that the switch was flipped, there was the scribble of information given to him toward the top, and the rest of the page filled with drawings the longer he was kept on the phone. It was almost absent, how it happened. Kurt would feel himself zoning out like usual and the pen would just scratch across the page as a means of keeping him there in the moment. The drawings were nothing really, usually a still life of whatever was in front of him or whatever was on his mind, quick and easy and done in minutes because once the phone call was over it was back to fingertips and keys on a keyboard.  
  
That was enough for him to feel a constant tug inside him, trying to pull him back to Brooklyn. It was ridiculous, he thought, because he could just as easily dig out his art supplies from wherever they were hiding in the back of his closet – and he did just that after two days of mindless drawing at work. It wasn’t the same, though. His apartment was nice and mostly quiet, though the walls were thin and his neighbors sometimes loud, but it wasn’t the right space. When he got home, there wasn’t anything inspiring him to sit and just  _do_.  
  
It reminded him of college and the times he would try to get work done in his dorm room rather than having to trek across campus to the art building. The problem with that, just like the problem with his apartment, was that there were too many distractions. There were television programs to catch up on that were collecting on his DVR, dishes and laundry to do, cleaning that needed to be done, emails to be read and the Internet to get lost in for hours on end. He’d always ended up having to go to the art building to accomplish anything back in college, just like he knew he’d need to be somewhere other than his apartment to do the same then.  
  
The hesitation Kurt had about going back seemed simple in his mind. Sure, Blaine had given that invitation but he was wary of just showing up out of the blue. At least the time he’d gone before, there had been an indicator of the fact that he might – whoever TCOCHA was getting into his computer and prodding him on. Given the span of time of the entire weekend, he wasn’t sure when an appropriate time was. What if he went and there was no one there? What if he went and there was someone there who he hadn’t met? Brittany had seemed nice and friendly and like she would let anyone inside, but what if there was someone who was more wary when they answered the door?  
  
Kurt almost wished that box would pop up on his computer and TCOCHA would talk to him again, but the entire week went by and he left work Friday evening without even the faintest trace.  
  
It was almost like the anticipation was coursing through him like adrenaline, and that was probably what made Kurt wake up so early the next morning. He’d resolved that he  _would_ go but he still hadn’t figured out when. He certainly wasn’t about to head over there soon after he woke up, since he’d done so early enough to sit out on the fire escape outside his window with his coffee and toast and watch the sun rise over the buildings of Manhattan. It was one of his favorite ways to spend the morning, up above the sounds of the city and nothing to rush him along.  
  
The anticipation still pushed him along, into the shower and to get dressed, gather his bag and sketchbook and get to the subway station. Despite his concern about who would be there, if he would even be welcome as Blaine had indicated before, Kurt felt more relaxed as he sat on the train than he had the first time. It was still a little early, but the ride was long and he figured he would find a coffee shop once he got to Brooklyn if the door was locked and no one was there.  
  
It was a different experience entirely than the first time he’d gone there, because the slight fear he’d had was replaced by more nerves. Kurt just hoped that someone  _was_ there, preferably someone he had already met, so he didn’t feel like a bit of a fool just standing on a doorstep and not knowing when he should have come. However, if there was one thing that living in New York had taught him, it was to walk with confidence and act like he knew exactly what he was doing. So once he was off the subway and down the street, directions that had gotten etched into his mind after just one journey, he strode up to the door like it was the most natural thing in the world and rang the doorbell.  
  
There was no answer, and Kurt tried the handle on a whim but it was locked. He supposed it was still a little early, and who knew when someone would get there. There  _had_ been a coffee shop between the subway station and where he was standing, and he’d figured getting something more flavorful than the coffee at his apartment wouldn’t hurt anything. It wasn’t until he was turned and headed back to the sidewalk that the lock clicked and the door opened, but he didn’t notice until he heard his name.  
  
“Kurt?” He glanced over his shoulder and stopped, spinning on his heel because there was Blaine – a slightly tired and disheveled looking Blaine, but still him nevertheless. Kurt had dressed down slightly due to it being the weekend, and that he was planning on sitting in a room by himself, and apparently so had Blaine. He looked warm and comfortable, like being wrapped up in a blanket on a cold fall day, and Kurt hoped it hadn’t been obvious that his gaze was lingering on the way Blaine’s shirt hung on him but Blaine didn’t look like he’d noticed.  
  
“Sorry,” Kurt replied, moving the few steps back toward the door and keeping his hand tight around the strap of his bag. “I know it’s early but I didn’t know what time would be good to come.”  
  
“No, it’s fine,” Blaine said, shaking his head and offering him a smile. “Great, even. Where… were you going?”  
  
“Coffee.” Kurt gestured back down the street. “I saw a place when I was walking…”  
  
“Oh perfect.” There was a moment of Blaine disappearing behind the door, but then he reemerged pulling a bag across his shoulders. “Mind if I join you?”  
  
“No, of course,” Kurt replied, watching as Blaine stepped out and let the door latch behind him, checking to make sure it was locked before falling into step beside him as they walked up the sidewalk. It was a quiet trek up the block to the coffee shop, and Blaine held the door open for them both when they arrived and was greeted by name by the barista behind the counter. Kurt raised an eyebrow at him, a grin tugging at the corners of his mouth when the barista moved to get Blaine’s coffee without waiting for him to order. “Come here often?”  
  
“Just about every morning,” Blaine admitted, but he smiled as he moved in closer to the counter. “I could make my own coffee, but I can never make it quite as good as they do here! Plus I like starting my mornings with familiar faces.”  
  
That statement caught Kurt’s attention more than anything else. He studied Blaine carefully a moment before being prompted by the barista if he wanted anything. “Oh yes, a medium non-fat mocha, please?”  
  
“Just put it with mine,” Blaine said to the barista, and Kurt once again found himself reaching for his wallet too late as there was already being money passed across the counter to pay. “I mean…” Blaine faltered a little when he realized Kurt was staring at him, and his gaze moved up to meet his. “I hope that’s okay? I just figured, you came all the way out here so I could at least get your coffee…”  
  
“If you really want to,” Kurt answered slowly, and as they walked to the end of the counter, the smile that lit up Blaine’s face completely took over any hesitation that had been there moments prior. “Can I ask you something?”  
  
“Anything.”  
  
“You do photography, right?” Kurt asked, and he got a nod in response. “Do you do Strangers in the City?”  
  
“ _Now_  who’s the one doing research?” Blaine replied, his eyes almost twinkling as he grinned. “But yes, I do.”  
  
It was the one segment of the magazine that Kurt thought he’d gotten right when trying to pair it with an artist. It was partially because Blaine had said he did photography, but it wasn’t like those were the only photographs in the publication. These were pictures of people, though. They were pictures, always black and white, of people around the city just going about their lives. It had always been one of Kurt’s favorite parts because it was so humanizing to a city that could seem stark, rushed, and full of dark spots.  
  
From the little Kurt had seen of Blaine, from their brief time together earlier in the week and then that morning, he wasn’t surprised at all that it was his doing. He seemed like the type of person who would see that which other people overlooked, which is exactly what his pictures were. Moments that would be lost in the hustle and bustle if not caught by his camera. They were always simple but looked so refined – a portrait, a moment of kindness, people reuniting, seeming almost staged for how perfectly they were captured and framed, but never looking posed.  
  
“I love those,” Kurt said absently, not realizing he’d actually said it out loud until Blaine thanked him. He flushed, reaching for his drink when the barista set it down on the counter. “You’re welcome. I… you’re very good,  _they’re_ very good.”  
  
They made it back to the warehouse without much else conversation, which was fine because it was a short walk. There were just so many questions floating through Kurt’s mind but he didn’t know where to start, or what might seem too intrusive. It felt like such a gift, having this world opened up to him, but he felt like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop.  
  
“I’m really glad you came,” Blaine said as he unlocked the door and held it open to let Kurt in before him. “I was hoping you would.”  
  
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Kurt admitted, but it wasn’t really what he meant. He knew what he was doing in the sense that he was there for a purpose, but it was more so to what end? Blaine just smiled, shrugging as he took a sip of his coffee.  
  
“Whatever you want.”  Blaine said it like it was so easy, so simple, and maybe it was – for him. At least he seemed to be aware that not everyone worked that easily. “You came here of your own volition, so I’m assuming you had some idea of what you wanted to do.”  
  
“I guess what I meant,” Kurt began again, cupping his mocha between both his hands and staring at it as he mulled over the words, “is that I don’t know what is expected from me.”  
  
“I don’t… have expectations,” Blaine replied, his voice soft and gentle. Kurt looked up to meet his gaze in time to see him shake his head. “I don’t. I mean, I know this whole thing is a little crazy and even I have a hard time believing it’s real half the time, so it’s strange. Yes, we provide artwork to people and yes, we have a publication, but it’s not like I was expecting you to come in here and start… producing for us. If you want to, that’s great, but I wasn’t even sure that you were coming back so I definitely didn’t have any expectations for you. There’s no pressure here.”  
  
Kurt was left to his own devices in the same room where he’d been before, same supplies and everything. It was quieter than it had been, but he supposed that was due to them being the only two people there – no Brittany or anyone else to add background noise. Blaine had mentioned needing to develop his film, and Kurt thought that if he found himself there more often he would have to truly explore the whole space considering there was actually a dark room on site.  
  
It was easy to lose track of time when he was there in that room, nothing to pull him out of what he was doing. Kurt made a few trips back and forth from the supply room because he couldn’t resist the opportunity to just play around with everything available to him there. That thought alone made him think back to earlier that week, the other girl with Brittany – _coming here and playing with us,_ she’d said. Maybe that was really all there was too it, just a place to play around and imagine, explore, but Kurt hadn’t realized anything like that could exist still for adults.  
  
His shirt sleeves were rolled up to his elbows early on, charcoal lingering on his fingers but he didn’t notice until he went to drink the last of his mocha and left fingerprints on the cup. It wasn’t until he went to switch to something else that he cared, not wanting to get black smudges all over the pastels that he’d gotten from the supply room before he’d really sat down to start. That was the first time he wandered any further into the building than he had before, because he wasn’t about to wipe his hands off on any of his clothes and he figured there had to be a bathroom there somewhere. It was easy enough to find, and even just being able to find his way around that little bit more made the place seem less unfamiliar and foreign.  
  
By the time Blaine reappeared with a light knock against the doorframe, Kurt had managed to spread out several drawings across the table in front of him. He thought maybe it was the free rein that was making it so easy and so haphazard all at once. Even when he’d been in school, there had usually been parameters or guidelines to follow for what he was doing, but _this_ – this was completely different. It was whatever he wanted, however he wanted, and getting a handle on how to pull it back and focus had taken at least a good hour and a few wasted doodles.  
  
“How’s it going?” he asked, crossing the room to move closer to the table and look down at what Kurt had done. “Oh wow.”  
  
“It’s fine,” Kurt replied, running a hand through his hair and glancing over to see where Blaine was looking. It was what he’d done with the pastels he’d found, mostly just the ocean and waves crashing, an experiment to get used to the medium more than anything else. “That’s… I was just messing with the colors.”  
  
“If that’s you just messing, I’d love to see what it looks like when you actually try,” Blaine said, his eyes twinkling with a smile as he looked at him. “Enjoying yourself?”  
  
“I am. How are your pictures?”  
  
“Oh they’re fine,” Blaine answered, waving his hand dismissively before letting it drop down to press his fingertips into the edge of the table. “Are you going to come back?”  
  
“What?” Kurt blinked up at him, his brow furrowing.  
  
“Well I don’t know how long you were going to be here today but I’m assuming you’d planned on leaving,” Blaine went on, his index finger tapping on the table absently. “Not right now, obviously, but at some point. I was just wondering… if you were going to come back again.”  
  
It wasn’t a question that Kurt had been expecting, and it didn’t help that Blaine looked over at him through those impossibly thick eyelashes of his in such an inquisitive and hopeful way. Truthfully, he hadn’t thought about anything past that day, but he knew deep down that he would want to. The hours that he’d spent there had been some of the most alive feeling of recent years, the city and real life blocked out and nothing but whatever he wanted to put down on paper or canvas to worry about.  
  
“I’d like to,” he replied, gaze flickering over the pages scattered on the table before moving back to meet Blaine’s. “Honestly though, I feel… bad? Not that this is bad, this is amazing, just that I’m getting something out of it and you aren’t.”  
  
“Who says I’m not?” Blaine asked, his head tilting to the side.  
  
“The other people who come here, I’m assuming they contribute pieces and work you can use,” Kurt went on, absently straightening the pastels and pencils that were still out of their cases. “I’m just messing around and using your stuff, it hardly seems like a fair trade.”  
  
“So give me something you want printed.”  
  
“You’re joking.”  
  
“No,” Blaine said evenly, shaking his head. “Kurt, do you think you would have come here if you didn’t have a  _reason?_  You wouldn’t have been invited if you weren’t someone with the talent to match what we do, so no, I’m not joking. I’ve seen your work before, what’s was available to see when we were looking into you – again, not creepy, sorry – and then when you were here the other day, that was beautiful. It was looking beyond the surface, beyond what was right in front of your face. Taking a place that was common to you and portraying how you felt about it, all in one piece.”  
  
His hand slid over across the table top and to Kurt’s, taking it and gently pulling him to his feet. There was a swooping sensation in Kurt’s stomach as he stood, but he wasn’t sure if it was because of how Blaine was talking or the way their hands fit together and how Blaine didn’t let go. There was still residue from the pastels on his fingers and he knew it was getting onto Blaine’s hand, he could see the smudges of blue and green on the back of it as his fingers shifted, but Blaine either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care – Kurt wasn’t sure which.  
  
“So I know you’ve looked through our magazine,” Blaine said as he led Kurt down the hall back to the room where Brittany had been the day before. Kurt had glanced in when he’d first gotten there but hadn’t taken much of it in. There was paint _everywhere_ , which wasn’t surprising given the state she’d been in when he’d seen her, but there were also long canvases all along the floor. Blaine gestured in and Kurt stepped past him, their hands slipping apart as he moved across to where he could look at them closer, not recognizing what they were until he was right overtop and could see them clearly.  
  
“Patterns and Variations,” he murmured, eyes following the footsteps of paint along the canvas, colorful and bright and some overlapping. It hadn’t ever occurred to him how big the canvases would be when all he saw was printed on the page, but he’d never really thought about the fact that he was looking at  _footprints_ so of course it would be to scale with them. He’d known what they were, because that was the entire point of the series, but they’d never stuck out to him until then.  
  
“Brittany didn’t paint until a couple years ago,” Blaine offered from the doorway before coming into the room. “She danced professionally, and then she got hurt and the physical therapy to get back to where she had been was intense and they recommended she try something as a creative outlet to relax since she couldn’t dance like she normally would in that situation.”  
  
“So she does this…”  
  
“She does other things too; she’s a pretty good painter with her hands, too.” Blaine was smiling when Kurt looked back at him, and he stepped over to the paintings. “But this is how she really got it through, being able to combine what she wanted to be doing and what she was able to do. It seems simple, right? Putting paint on her feet and dancing across the canvas – seems simple but she does so much more than just that. It’s just that not everything is meant to be printed, meant to be put up on display somewhere.  
  
“That’s why it doesn’t matter if you just want to ‘mess around’ and use the stuff we have here,” he concluded quietly. “Some things are just for fun, or just for you, but it’s all part of the process. Believe me, you’re not putting anyone out by using what we have in there – we have good funding. If you don’t want to contribute to anything more than yourself, that’s fine, but please don’t make that choice because you don’t think you’re good enough. I’ve seen enough of your work to know you are.”  
  
By the time Kurt left to head back to his apartment, Blaine had given him a key. Everyone who worked there had one, he’d said, and if Kurt was going to come back it was only right that he did too. It was a show of trust – obviously that he trusted Kurt to have free access to their space, but also that Blaine trusted that he would make good use of it. It wasn’t just a key; it was an invitation that gave him the freedom for whenever he wanted or was able.  
  
More than that, it was an acceptance. Kurt held the key in his hand the whole subway ride back to his stop, turning it over, tracing the teeth of it, almost as if he were trying to memorize it purely on touch. It was symbolic not only of what he’d started to do in his free time but also that he was accepted by the people surrounding that choice – well Blaine at least, but by the way he’d been speaking it felt like the rest were there in proxy. After all, what hadn’t felt like acceptance that first day? He’d been welcomed in and given anything he could have wanted to work with practically no question. Kurt felt like he was part of something, even though he’d just barely dipped his toes in the water of whatever that something was, and that felt exciting.  
  
Maybe that was why he felt like he wanted to go back as soon and as much as possible, because Kurt couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt that excited about something. It was purely creative and nothing that drained his motivation like his job did, though he had been explicitly clear again in talking to Blaine that he wasn’t about to quit his job for whatever it was Blaine expected from him. And Blaine had been explicitly clear again that there were no expectations.  
  
That was just how it was, simple and without preamble. It still took a good bit for it to register with Kurt that Blaine actually meant it when he said that, almost with everything else that came out of his mouth. There was such sincerity in his words that it was difficult not to get wrapped up in them, or at least that how Kurt felt. It made him believe in what Blaine said despite not knowing too much about him at first, though he did return the favor of researching him just as Blaine had done to him. Technology made it easy to find out so much about a person even with the smallest starting point, and Kurt was grateful to have had that to work with to put his mind more at ease.  
  
Having the ability to go and lose himself in his artwork anytime he wanted without the question of whether there would be someone to let him in or not, well that was both a blessing and a curse. It was wonderful to have that ability, but having the knowledge that he could meant that was all Kurt wanted to do.


	3. Chapter Three

It started out small – a few hours in the afternoon here, a half-day there. For once Kurt was grateful that his job was something ordinary and mostly unimportant, at least in the grand scheme of things, because that made it easy for him to take the time off. There were enough people in his department that his boss never flinched when he gave a short notice along the lines of “I’d like to take the rest of the day off, starting in half an hour,” but that also might have had to do with the quality of work he put out when he was there. With no real reason to complain, there wasn’t much his boss could say. It wasn’t like he could predict when he’d want to go, so at least he could appreciate that aspect of where he worked – and also having the vacation hours to do it since he never went anywhere.

 

Blaine wasn’t always there, and sometimes no one was. Kurt found it the eeriest when he was the only person there, but it was also peaceful. He liked being able to unplug his headphones and have the music surrounding him in the room. That was another factor that made it different than being at work, being able to have something not so contained just to him internally, being able to release and unplug. It was one of the best feelings in the world, to turn up the cuffs on his sleeves, maybe undo a button of his shirt, and not be attached to anything. He felt liberated every time.

 

Even when someone else was there, it wasn’t as though Kurt ever felt intruded upon. It seemed to be a very live-and-let-live atmosphere for the most part, though with the occasional footsteps moving past the door and pausing just long enough for him to know someone was there. Brittany came in once or twice to ask him what he was listening to, and then would usually scrawl the song title and artist on her arm with a marker he’d grown accustomed to seeing tucked behind her ear. Blaine was the only one who would stop in for longer than a question or two, who would actually sit and take the time to hold a conversation. He never felt like he was taking away from the time Kurt had there because talking to Blaine always made Kurt feel fortified in what he was doing.

 

While Kurt had a lot to show for his time there, so many experiments in different mediums that the room that had been deemed his was quickly filling and no longer so drab and plain, he hadn’t done anything where he felt like it was worth being seen next to the works he knew would be published. There still wasn’t any pressure, and Blaine was more than encouraging and confident in Kurt’s talent and prowess, but Kurt just didn’t feel right about any of what he’d done in that particular frame of reference. That was why he went every time – not just to get what was in his head out onto the paper, the canvas, whatever he had, but also to try and find that piece that was worth more.

 

_User TCOCHA is requesting access to remotely control your computer. Yes or No._

It had been months since Kurt had seen that message pop on his computer the first time, and it sent a thrill through him when it happened again. TCOCHA had been pushed to the back of his mind thanks to everything else that emerged since that first day, and other than knowing that it wasn’t Blaine he had no idea who it could be. There were all the people he saw infrequently at the warehouse, some he’d gotten to know a little better than others, but he wouldn’t have even known where to start guessing with any of them.

 

He clicked ‘Yes’ without hesitation.

 

**Hello, Kurt. Still stuck here? :(**

**You should take the rest of the day off.**

**It would be worth your while, but act quickly…**

Kurt had no idea why he’d expected it to be any less cryptic than the first time, but there it was. He stared at the screen a long moment before typing out an email to his boss that he was going to take the rest of the day off “if that’s alright with you, I just had something come up suddenly that I need to take care of.” His emails always tried to reference some sort of event or circumstance so it didn’t seem like he was taking off just for the sake of not being there, though he kind of was and wasn’t at the same time. The response was almost immediate that it was fine for him to do so, but he was already halfway through collecting his bag and closing out of all the programs on his computer by that time.

 

It didn’t strike him until he was on the elevator to get down to the ground level that he wasn’t sure what he was going to do with his day. He assumed he would just go to the warehouse like he always did, but it was the fact that TCOCHA had said it would be worth his while,  _but act quickly_. That sentence ran through his head over and over, his brow furrowing in thought, until he got down to the lobby and crossed it to go out to the sidewalk like he did every day and saw what they must have meant.

 

Blaine was leaning on the side of the building just outside the door, and Kurt took the moment before he looked up to appreciate what he was wearing. When he saw Blaine at the warehouse, he always looked well put together but with an air of comfort. There outside Kurt’s office building, he looked like he could walk into any of the buildings and fit right in, though maybe a little too dressy for a generic desk job. No one in Kurt’s department wore bow ties, for example, and Blaine was sporting a purple one. Kurt had just enough time to take in the fit of all his clothes before their eyes met and a smile brightened Blaine’s face.

 

“Kurt, hi!”

 

“What are you doing here?” Kurt asked, stepping over next to him to stay out of the way of pedestrians passing by.

 

“I was going to go take pictures,” Blaine replied, holding up his camera. “Thought you might like to come along?”

 

“Oh, I – sure.” Kurt paused, adjusting how his bag was on his shoulder before gesturing up toward the building. “Is this what that was about?”

 

“What? Oh, yes. I mean, I don’t have your phone number and I wasn’t sure what security was like here. Seemed like the most foolproof way.” He shrugged and Kurt raised an eyebrow. “Why, what did she say?”

 

“To leave, and if I did it quickly it would be worth my while.”

 

“I think she gets bored and therefore cryptic,” Blaine said with a laugh, shaking his head. “All I asked was for her to tell you that if you wanted to come with me, I would be down here waiting for fifteen minutes or so before I went.”

 

They made their way to the subway and a few stops away before Blaine nodded for them to get off. It was interesting to see him in a different setting than usual, and even better to get to see him work. Kurt had asked him before about his camera choices, because it seemed like digital would be so much easier and less work in the long run. Blaine had explained that he liked the work of it, the artistry in focusing the image himself and only having that one shot, one chance to get it how he wanted. There was the mystery of not knowing if it came out until he developed the film, which was another part of the process he said he loved.

 

Seeing  Blaine at work was incredible, especially after having seen so much of his art previously in the magazine. Kurt relished the opportunity to see how it all came together, because it was just like he’d thought. They were in a park and it was like a constant clicking beside him, the shudder on Blaine’s camera going and going, capturing moments before they passed but Kurt barely saw them in time. He saw the people, watching them as they came and went, as they stopped and looked at the sights, but very rarely anything that he would have recognized as something that he would expect from what he knew of Blaine’s work.

 

It just kind of reaffirmed what Kurt had thought before, about how Blaine saw what other people overlooked. He was there with the purpose of trying to see exactly that and he kept missing it. The longer they were out, the better he got at focusing in on the people around them and the moments that Blaine tended to see. It was relaxing once he got better at it, to block out so much of what was happening around them and just try to pay attention to the little things. Even though he caught some of the moments Blaine was, more as the afternoon went on, Kurt couldn’t wait to see them once they were developed because Blaine had such a way of framing and composing his shots that he was sure it would be like seeing it for the first time all over again.

 

“I want to show you something.” Kurt had stopped to sit for a moment, letting Blaine wander off down the path to keep taking pictures, and he’d gotten caught up in checking his phone for the first time since he’d left the office. It wasn’t that he’d missed any calls, but there were plenty of emails waiting for him. His attention was drawn away from his inbox when Blaine spoke, and he looked up to see him standing there in front of him with his camera cradled in his arms and a gentle smile on his face.

 

“Show me what?” he asked, sliding his phone into his pocket as he stood. Blaine’s smile just brightened and he shook his head.

 

“You’ll see.”

 

It took another subway ride before they were back to the sidewalk, wandering through the buildings and streets of the Lower East Side. Considering that it was closer to the end of normal work day hours, it was more crowded as they went. Blaine reached for Kurt’s hand to navigate them through a crowd at one point, and it still made Kurt’s stomach swoop just as it had the first time and every time after – not that Blaine held his hand often, but it wasn’t exactly an uncommon thing if he was walking with him or leading him somewhere.

 

The walk wasn’t too long before Blaine ducked under an awning, gently tugging Kurt with him before letting go of his hand and fishing into his bag for something. Kurt tilted his head as he watched, an eyebrow raising when Blaine pulled out a set of keys. He’d barely had a chance to glance at the building behind them before Blaine was unlocking the door and motioning with his head that Kurt should follow.

 

It was dark thanks to the paper covering the windows, but Blaine hit a light switch near the door and the bare lighting on the ceiling illuminated the room. It was deep, empty other than some equipment that had clearly been used for remodeling, and looked just as plain as Kurt’s workspace at the warehouse had been before he’d taken up filling it with whatever he could. His gaze swept around the room and he took a few steps inside, his footsteps on the hardwood floor the only sound beyond the muffled street noise coming in the windows and closed door.

 

“What do you think?” Blaine asked after a moment, dropping his keys into his bag and wandering to the middle of the room. He looked a little anxious, and Kurt tilted his head and let his eyes take in the room again in case he’d somehow missed something the first time around.

 

“What is it?”

 

“Our future gallery,” Blaine replied, his arms outstretched to the room around him. “It’s been a pipe dream for a while but now… it’s real.” He dropped his hands to his sides, smiling over at Kurt. “Isn’t it great? I mean, I know it’s just an empty room but it’s not  _going_ to be.”

 

“That’s… incredible,” Kurt said slowly, taking a few more steps into the space and letting his gaze wander as his mind worked. A gallery made sense, especially considering everything else they had in the first place. Synergy in general, though not Kurt by his own omission, had artwork displayed in several office buildings across the city, and then of course the magazine, but not anywhere that was dedicated just to their work.

 

Having their own gallery, a place where anyone could come specifically to see their work, actual physical pieces, not just what was printed in a magazine, truly did sound like a dream come true. Kurt remembered how it had been in college, how their artwork had been juried and chosen and displayed out in any of the various galleries on campus. It had always been such a feeling of pride to make something that made it through the process and was out where people went to see it. And then the solo exhibit he’d gotten to do when he was a senior, a space dedicated entirely to showcasing his work – that had been one of the best experiences he could have imagined.

 

“I know you haven’t felt like putting any of your work out there,” Blaine continued, his tone soft but voice echoing slightly in the emptiness of the room, and he reached over to rest his hand on Kurt’s arm. “And that’s still fine if you don’t, but I would love for you to be part of this. There have been some ideas floated around for collaborations and I know you worry about finding the right niche but I think this would be a great opportunity to put yourself out there – only if you want, obviously, but if you were waiting for the right moment… I don’t know if you could find a better one.”

 

Blaine was right at least on the surface, Kurt knew. He’d been hesitating from letting his work be put out there because he didn’t have a running theme like Blaine and Brittany, or Santana – the girl from his first day there who he rarely saw but he knew she did a photography series of the city itself rather than the people inhabiting it like Blaine did. There were others too – Quinn, Sam – though Kurt didn’t see them as frequently or as often but he was familiar of their work and how, while it wasn’t so much a series as the others, it was all tied together at least somewhat. While he knew what he was producing was good, he didn’t know if it was good  _enough_  to be put with the rest.

 

There was also a hesitation of commitment because when it came to what was important in his life, like his art, Kurt didn’t like to do anything half-assed. He felt like if he were to start doing anything that would be featured somehow, either in the magazine or the gallery, he would need to be able to focus on that full time instead of just whenever he was away from work. That was the tricky part, because Blaine had always seemed so blasé about him being able to leave his job whenever he wanted and being fine but Kurt had never quite believed that was possible. It sounded too good to be true, but then again so did the rest of it and it had all managed to be real so far.

 

“Do you have any plans for dinner?” Kurt asked, his gaze rising to meet Blaine’s just in time to the brief flicker of confusion in them.

 

“No, I don’t. Why?”

 

“Well it’s,” Kurt paused to pull out his phone and look at it, “it’s about that time and I was going to say we could go back to my apartment to make something if you weren’t busy.” He paused under the pretense of sliding his phone away but it was also because of the slight nerves that came on at the invitation.  It wasn’t as though he meant anything by it more than it was, an offer of dinner, but he had questions that he needed answered to quell the concerns he had about everything in general. “It’s okay if you say no; I know that was sudden and probably weird—”

 

“No, it wasn’t, that sounds perfect,” Blaine cut in, his fingers sliding down Kurt’s arm lightly until they reached his hand and gave it a squeeze. “I was just going to grab something on my way home, otherwise. I’d much rather eat with you than do that.”

 

It wasn’t a long trip to get to Kurt’s apartment from where they were, though he’d given the empty gallery space on last glance over before they left to fortify his mind on what he wanted to do. The subway was crowded but that was to be expected, and Kurt was glad once they were able to actually move out onto the platform at his stop and have room to breathe. It wasn’t until they were up on street level that Blaine mentioned how he liked Kurt’s version of the platform than the real life one, harkening back to the first day and the drawings he’d done.

 

“Feel free to make yourself at home,” Kurt said as he unlocked the door to his apartment, letting them in and automatically setting his bag next to the armchair like it always was before ducking into the small kitchen nook. “You don’t have any food allergies, do you? Or anything you hate? I was going to make pork chops and asparagus…”

 

“That sounds delicious,” Blaine replied, leaning in the doorway of the kitchen. “And I’m not allergic to any of it. Would you like any help?”

 

“I appreciate the offer, but it’s pretty easy and there’s not much room for a second person in here.” Kurt shrugged and glanced over at him. “Thank you, though.”

 

It was what Kurt had been planning on having for dinner anyway, and thankfully he had enough for two. There was something to be said about always making extra to have for lunch the next day, otherwise he wouldn’t have. It was quick to make, though he didn’t exactly have any concerns about Blaine being off in his apartment on his own – he didn’t have anything to hide or something embarrassing sitting out. By the time it was all cooked and done, it seemed like Blaine had just wandered around enough to acquaint himself with his surroundings and then settled in Kurt’s armchair until dinner was done.

 

There was a small table at which they could eat, and a bottle of wine that was easily split between them as they did. Blaine insisted on helping clean up since he hadn’t been allowed to help cook, and practically blocked Kurt out of the kitchen to keep him from being able to stop him from doing just that. “I’m sorry; did you not make me dinner? That means you go sit, relax, and let me deal with this.”

 

Kurt could hardly argue, especially with Blaine pouring him another glass of wine and shooing him away from the kitchen. Having the time to sit and think more about what was potentially on the horizon before he actually approached any of the questions was probably good, though it was nice to have the slight distraction of Blaine humming to himself in the kitchen amongst the sound of dishes being washed.

 

“Can I ask you something?” Kurt asked when Blaine reemerged, his own glass of wine in hand.

 

“Anything.”

 

“Say I were to quit my job to come do Synergy full time,” Kurt began, swirling the wine around in his glass as he looked up at Blaine. “How would that… work?”

 

“Are you going to?” Blaine asked, his eyes widening as he leaned against the wall. “That would be incredible. You would just need to be okay with your works being displayed and published.”

 

“I got that part I just wasn’t sure how it worked in terms of… me losing my source of income.” It truly was the most important question of it all, though Kurt did feel slightly bad bringing it up. After all, hadn’t be basically been reaping the benefits of the group without actually giving anything substantial in return?

 

“Well obviously you’ll be compensated for your work,” Blaine replied, in that gentle tone of his that always managed to put Kurt at ease quicker than anything. “It’s not a typical business model, I’m well aware, but I’m fairly certain that you would make more with us than you do at your current job.”

 

Kurt watched as Blaine moved to sit across from him, perching on the edge of his seat as he went on, explaining about how everything had started back at the beginning, the meetings with his friend’s father who had been the cause of it all and how it had been some trial and error before they came up with a way for everything to work. For someone who hadn’t studied business, Blaine at least understood the fundamentals and had thought things out thoroughly with the way he’d presented ideas and managed to talk his way into funding for it all.

 

Producing artwork for a several corporate buildings in the city was one thing, but pitching the idea for a magazine had been something different entirely. The fact that it would produce a source of income was what had pushed it through, and had given Blaine more free reign on bringing more people into the collaboration in general. Before that it had been him and couple friends who had moved on since, but having a publication meant a need for variety and the more the merrier, as far as Blaine was concerned. There was a limit to their available funds, it wasn’t like an endless supply of money for whatever they wanted, but it was high enough that Blaine said they had yet to hit it – and that included salary for anyone who contributed.

 

“You never told me that before because…?”

 

“You never seemed interested,” Blaine offered, but he had a slight bashful grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. “I mean, it’s not like we just throw money around or anything, we like for people to have shown us that they’re good investments, so to speak, and I knew you would be if you ever wanted to be so it was just a matter of waiting for you to decide that you were. I always would have told you if you’d asked, just like I’m doing now.” He paused, setting his glass down and glancing back over to Kurt, eyes sincere. “I don’t think it does any good to push people into things, especially if it means they might do it for the wrong reason. It’s the type of thing a person needs to do for themself, not just for the money.”

 

Kurt’s mind had been all but made up already before Blaine explained it all, and considering that most of his concerns had been financial there were practically none left by the time Blaine left not much later, needing to get back to Brooklyn. He took their empty glasses into the kitchen and couldn’t help but smile at how spotless it was, dishes drying in the rack by the sink and everything wiped down to a shine. It wasn’t until he went to walk out of the small room that he saw the little note scrawled on the white board hanging on the refrigerator –  _Thanks for dinner!_

 

Settling back in his chair, he retrieved his phone from his bag and hit speed dial for his dad. It wasn’t that he had much worry left about what he wanted to do, but there was always that want for his decisions and choices to be accepted by the people who meant the most to him. Thankfully, his dad had always been supportive of him with what he’d chosen to do in life, but there were still slight nerves fluttering in Kurt’s stomach as he listened to the ringing on his phone until his call was picked up.

 

“Hey, Kurt.”

 

“Hi, Dad. How are you?”

 

“I’m fine. Everything okay? You don’t normally call this late. Not that I mind, you know, I just…”

 

“Worry, I know,” Kurt replied, chewing on the inside of his lip. “I’m okay.”

 

“You sure? Work going good, your apartment okay?”

 

“It’s all fine I just wanted to… run something by you.”

 

“Shoot.”

 

“Okay,” he began, drawing in a breath and exhaling it slowly. “I know you worried about me going to school for art and then being in New York, and I know you were glad when I got a steady job even though it wasn’t what I planned on doing. There’s an opportunity… it’s getting to do what I’ve always wanted full time but it’s not exactly conventional. I just wanted to make sure you wouldn’t be – I don’t know – more worried? Disappointed?”

 

“Kurt,” his dad cut in, sounding caught somewhere between amused and serious. “When have I  _ever_ been disappointed in anything you’ve done?”

 

“…never.”

 

“You’re an adult, Kurt. You don’t have to run everything by me…”

 

“I know, I just,” Kurt broke off with a sigh, rubbing a hand over his face before letting it drop to his lap and continuing. “I know I don’t have to ask for permission to do things, I just like knowing I have your support.”

 

There was a long pause before his dad spoke again. “Not exactly conventional… it’s nothing illegal, is it?”

 

“Oh God, no.”

 

“Is it going to make you happy, doing this?”

 

“I really think so.” Going off of his trips out to Brooklyn as they were then, whenever he could manage, Kurt knew he was happier than he had been before, and even just the thought of getting to do that and  _only_ that was enough to make him feel like he was welling up with happiness. “So far it has.”

 

“As long as you’re happy and safe, then it sounds good to me. Now why don’t you tell me more about this.”

 

By the time Kurt hung up the phone some time later, he’d told his dad everything – sparing a detail or two about how he’d first got invited and went off without knowing what he was walking into. It had all worked out in the end so he didn’t think those were important to bring up. He went to bed easily, falling asleep drafting a letter of resignation in his head.


	4. Chapter Four

Two weeks’ notice wasn’t strictly necessary, but Kurt gave it anyway. Burning bridges wasn’t exactly his style, and he didn’t want to completely blow his chances of getting a job back there if he ever needed it. Besides, it wasn’t like it had been a  _bad_ job. His boss had been perfectly kind and understanding with anything and everything Kurt had ever brought to his attention, and his coworkers bland yet inoffensive, so he didn’t want to throw his resignation in their face and walk out the door all at once. He’d been mentally checked out long before then, it was just a matter of formality.

 

The time went by quicker than Kurt had expected. Having something waiting at the end of it, he’d expected the days to drag on and feel like they would never end. But they didn’t, and before he knew it he’d cleared off the walls of his cubicle and packed up the few assorted personal belongings that were left there, turning off his computer for the last time before leaving the building for good. The exit interview had been brief, and he’d been logged in just long enough to see the security awareness email go out to the entire company, letting them know that he was no longer employed there, and then he was gone.

 

His last day had only been half of one – a Friday morning spent mostly not working but rather going through all the motions of finishing what was necessary. He hadn’t wanted to be there the whole day when there was no point, and besides, Blaine had decided there should be a celebration of sorts that evening. It was partially for Kurt, leaving the corporate world and giving in to the creative one whole heartedly, but also about the gallery. It wasn’t just a celebration, it was planning. It was time for them all to get together and collaborate on what they wanted to do for the grand opening. So Kurt left midday and went to his apartment to drop off his things and get changed into something other than office attire before heading out again.

 

The ride to Brooklyn didn’t feel any different, though Kurt had imagined it would. There was no overarching weight of ‘real life’ or reality trying to pull him away from feeling free and relaxed, because that was all he had from that point forward. He had freedom –  _that_ was his real life and reality. He could do what he wanted when he wanted, which was still so absurd to think about, and he knew it would take time to get used to but he couldn’t shake how overwhelmingly happy it made him to think about.

 

“Kurt!” He’d barely made it through the door before he heard his name being called from down the corridor, and he glanced up to see Blaine wandering down it toward him. “How was the last day?”

 

“As good as it could have been,” Kurt replied, smiling as he slipped his keys into his bag, splitting the distance with Blaine and meeting him toward the middle. “It felt  _really good_ to leave and know I’m not going back.”

 

“I can imagine.” Blaine smiled brightly, and he glanced over his shoulder briefly before looking back to Kurt. “We were going to get pizza, is that alright with you? We didn’t order yet or anything, so toppings are still up for debate.”

 

“Sounds perfect.” Kurt followed Blaine back through the building to where everyone else was already, sitting on the floor in a large open space and laughing at something that had been said. Brittany was most likely the culprit, sprawled on her stomach with her feet kicked up in the air behind her as she giggled, only breaking off when she looked over and saw Kurt taking his bag off his shoulder and setting it down.

 

“Kurt, yay! You’re here!” She propped herself up on her forearms and smiled over at him before her expression turned serious – well, as serious as it could. “You don’t like anchovies, do you?”

 

“No, I don’t,” Kurt answered, moving to sit on one of the blankets on the floor, his legs folding in front of him.

 

“Good, it’s settled. No anchovies. Fish don’t belong on pizzas, just in tacos!”

 

There wasn’t too much discussion further about the food, considering that they were going to get multiple pizzas anyway so everyone could pretty much get whatever they wanted regardless. Brittany had been concerned about the anchovies because of how horrible they smelled more so than someone actually liking them on pizza. Drinks were gathered from the refrigerator off in the corner – beer for everyone even though Santana threatened tequila shots. Blaine was quick to shut that down, at least until serious discussions were out of the way so they would all remember what was going on.

 

“Alright, so while we’re waiting for the pizza,” Blaine started, after calling and ordering, “We should get the gallery talk out of the way.”

 

“What do we need to talk about?” Quinn asked, tilting her head and taking a sip of her beer. “I mean, I know there  _are_ things to talk about but I just didn’t know where you were starting.”

 

“For me, the most important thing is determining what we want to have for the opening,” Blaine continued, nodding in her direction. “Obviously we’re all used to doing our own thing and being fairly removed from the public eye… but this is different and opens us up a little more. I was thinking we could all work together – not all at once, that would be crazy – to showcase our differing mediums and projects through collaboration.”

 

“Oh, like you were talking to me and I said I could dance with people,” Brittany piped up, tapping her fingers against the bottle in her hand. “I liked that idea.”

 

“Exactly, like that,” Blaine replied with a soft smile, and Kurt thought that he looked proud. “Did you want to maybe explain that to everyone else?”

 

“Sure!” Brittany pushed up from the floor and sat back on her knees, setting her beer in front of her and folding her hands in her lap. “It’s just like what I do always, but with someone else! So I was thinking, um, different colored paint obviously but I could teach everybody a different type of dance to do with me and then we would do that. It sounds kind of… simple, but I thought it would be something cool…”

 

“It is,” Santana interrupted, leaning over and nudging Brittany’s shoulder lightly. For as confident and pleased with the idea as she’d sounded at the beginning, Brittany had faded slightly throughout her explanation. Maybe it was the difference between excitedly discussing something with Blaine and then trying to present it to a group of people. It was intimidating, Kurt thought, no matter how well a person knew the people involved. Santana had clearly picked up on it too. “We’ve done it before just for fun and I thought it was great.”

 

“So that’s a great example of what I was talking about.” Blaine’s eyes flitted around the entire little circle they’d formed, and then seemed to sparkle a little extra when they met Kurt’s. “This gallery is kind of… well, almost like a coming out party. We’ve kept our names out of it all until now and I don’t think that’s going to change when it comes to the magazine or anything like that, but with the gallery it seems like we should actually put ourselves out there. We’ve already proven our merit so this is just the next step.  
  
“I figure it would be nice to have these projects that we work on with each other to kind of… introduce ourselves without actually having to do just that,” he went on, idly tracing around the label on the bottle in his hands. “Then other than that, we can look and see what else we want and how it will work together. We have a couple months before opening, so there’s time to talk and figure it all out. I know I’m really excited about it all and I hope you are too.”

 

There wasn’t much more discussion before the pizza came, at least not with the whole group gathered there together. Side conversation murmured around him, and Kurt picked up little pieces here and there. Sam reassuring Brittany that he thought her idea was good and that he was looking forward to it – “and I call dibs on red paint, so don’t let anybody else take it!” – mixed in with Quinn talking with Santana and using the condensation off her beer to trace something out on the floor. Kurt quietly mulled over ideas in his head, sorting through possibilities. The doorbell interrupted it all and Blaine hopped up to answer it, coming back with pizza boxes to set on the table.

 

It was hot and  _so good_  and when Blaine asked if it tasted like freedom, Kurt couldn’t do much other than nod. It wasn’t just the pizza itself, though it really was delicious and even better than the pizza place that Kurt loved near his apartment, but he thought maybe it tasted better considering he was surrounded by friends and people that were just enjoying themselves. It wasn’t like he’d eaten with others that often and even rarer in a group of more than two or three, but these were people that he’d grown to know over the months and it was comfortable. Pizza tasted better when it was being shared by friends, he was sure that was part of it. That and the fact that it was the first thing he’d eaten since freeing himself entirely of his job.

 

“So what are  _you_ going to do?” he asked Blaine, leaning over and nudging their shoulders together lightly. Blaine raised an eyebrow but then smiled, finishing the bite he’d been chewing and swallowing it down.

 

“I had a thought,” Blaine replied, his head tilting to the side and his gaze moving around to everyone before settling on Kurt again. “It’ll only work if everyone agrees to it, though I’m not exactly expecting resistance…”

 

There was a long pause and Kurt took the opportunity to finish off the piece of pizza he’d been working on before speaking up again. “And what was this thought? Go on…”

 

“Portraits of everyone. Simple, but stark and clean,” Blaine continued. “I just have this vision in my head, and I feel like they could be really powerful. There are a few details to iron out but I think I know what I want to do.”

 

“I can’t wait.”

 

“You’ll let me take your picture?” Blaine asked, a soft teasing lilt to his voice and his smile reaching up to his eyes.

 

“Blaine, I’m pretty sure if there was only one person ever who I would let take my picture, that would be you,” Kurt replied, his gaze dropping down to his nearly empty beer bottle before he finished it off and looked back to Blaine. He could feel that his face was flushed – he had hoped the chill of his drink would help and it hadn’t – but he was glad to see that there was a bit of pinkness on the apples of Blaine’s cheeks as well.

 

“I can’t wait,” Blaine said softly, repeating Kurt’s words from just moments prior and looking like he was going to say something more when Santana stood up and cleared her throat loudly to get their attention.

 

“Excuse me, but I believe there’s more than one reason we’re here,” she started, giving a pointed look toward Kurt and waving around the tequila bottle in her hand. “All the serious talk is done, right, Blaine?”

 

“Um yes,” Blaine replied, setting down his plate. “I mean, everyone already knows so—”

 

“Hummel’s done being ridiculous and has finally seen the light to come and join our happy little commune,” Santana continued, slightly louder than was necessary. “So that’s even more reason for celebration and  _that_ means tequila!”

 

“That’s really not necessary,” Kurt spoke up, eyes widening slightly. It wasn’t that he didn’t like tequila, because he did, there was just a glint in Santana’s eyes that he didn’t trust. “Really, it’s not—”

 

“We are  _celebrating_. Totally necessary.” Santana gave him a look that she clearly believed ended any discussion about the topic. “Brittany, bring those limes over!”

 

It was somewhere between the second and third shot that Kurt found himself leaning back on his hands, lazily gazing around at the people gathered there and thinking about how he’d ended up there with them. If anyone had told him months before that was where he was going to be – sitting around with a bunch of people he’d never met until someone on his computer told him to go somewhere, eating pizza, drinking tequila, planning artwork to be put up in a gallery – there was no way he ever would have believed it. He thought it was a lot of luck, but Blaine was always quick to point out that it was hard work – if Kurt hadn’t put in the work previously and been talented, it wouldn’t have mattered how much luck he had.

 

_And fate_ , Blaine would add.  _Also fate._

 

“Seriously,” Santana said as she poured more liquor into his shot glass. “I’m glad you finally dropped that job.”

 

“Thanks, Santana,” Kurt replied, a soft smile pulling at the corners of his mouth as she clinked their glasses together and downed her shot.

 

“I’m glad too,” Blaine added from his other side, bumping shoulders with him. “But you already knew that.”

 

Blaine raised his own shot in a toast before downing it. Kurt followed suit, skipping the salt but not the lime, his nose scrunching at the tartness of it before he discarded the rind. He felt warm and a more than a little tingly all over, and he felt like it was mostly to blame on the alcohol but not entirely. It was also Blaine and the way he smiled when he looked over at him, like he had some sort of secret behind those dark honey colored eyes of his that he refused to tell. There was still that annoying yet wonderful swooping feeling in Kurt’s stomach any time their hands touched, and he blamed that too.

 

“So when was the last time you didn’t have to set an alarm for Monday morning?” Blaine asked, smiling over at Kurt before starting to gather up all the plates still scattered on the floor between everyone.

 

“I can’t even remember,” Kurt replied honestly, watching him a moment before gathering the empty bottles within his reach. Blaine got to his feet first, offering him a hand to help him up which Kurt gladly took. “I’ll probably still wake up at the same time even if I don’t…”

 

“But with the bonus of being able to roll over and go back to sleep,” Blaine pointed out, tossing the plates into the trash can and offering him a smile. “That’s the best part, I think. I mean, I always wake up early but knowing that most days I can just bury myself under the blankets and ignore the morning for a little while longer… it’s one of the best feelings.”

 

Quinn was the first to leave, despite having been locked in conversation with Brittany and Santana for a long time. She gave them both hugs before wandering over to where Kurt was rinsing out the beer bottles in the sink, despite Blaine insisting that it could wait and he could do it later. It gave him something to do and made him feel helpful, but he quickly dried his hands when Quinn came over and slipped her arms around his waist in a slightly cuddly hug.

 

“I’ve got to get home,” she said, tilting her head on his shoulder to look up at him. Her cheeks were rosy and Kurt figured she was at least tipsy considering he couldn’t think of any time that Quinn had touched him past trying to get his attention a time or two, yet there she was, but her smile was soft and sincere. “But I’m really glad you’re here, Kurt.”

 

“Thanks, Quinn,” he replied, returning her hug before she slid over to say goodbye to Blaine.

 

“I’ll get her home,” Sam said as he came over, patting Kurt on the shoulder and nodding over toward Blaine. Kurt assumed his comment was meant more for Blaine than him, but he appreciated knowing she’d get home safe all the same. “She’s on my way.”

 

They had barely left before Brittany grabbed onto Kurt’s hand and swung it between them. “We’re going up to the roof, want to come?”

 

“The roof?”

 

“Yeah, it’s upstairs,” Brittany replied, staring at him. Kurt blinked, caught between wanting to reply but not knowing what to say. “It’s my favorite place.”

 

“Sure…” It wasn’t that Kurt was opposed, he’d just never considered much beyond the first floor because he’d never gone there. There were three floors, but he’d never had reason to go exploring – everything he’d been interested in was right there when he came in.

 

“Are there still chairs up there, Blaine?” Brittany asked, glancing over at Blaine as he came back from walking out Sam and Quinn. “On the roof?”

 

“No, they got taken off not too long ago,” Blaine replied, shaking his head. “We could take the blankets up, though, if you wanted to sit.”

 

They gathered up the blankets they’d been sitting on there in the room before traipsing up the stairs. Other than the stairway, the second floor was dark. Blaine mentioned that it had his dark room but was mostly storage other than that, and the third floor was the same minus the dark room aspect. The building wasn’t huge, but there was room for growth and for keeping what wasn’t on display somewhere and that people didn’t have room for or want where they lived.

 

The roof itself was bare, lit faintly by the glow of streetlights below just enough that Kurt didn’t feel like he was going to trip over anything. Brittany wrapped her blanket around herself and wandered to the edge, carefully sitting and letting her feet dangle, and Santana wasn’t far behind. Blaine checked to make sure the door wouldn’t lock behind them, though he reassured Kurt that he had his keys with him, and ventured out onto the middle of it with him, stopping to spread out his blanket and lay down on it.

 

“You can sit,” Blaine said, looking up at Kurt and smiling softly when he did. It wasn’t the most comfortable place Kurt had ever sat, but the view made up for it entirely.

 

There were strings of lights overhead, he could see, the bulbs reflecting some of the ambient light around. It wasn’t quiet, nowhere in the city ever was, but it seemed peaceful despite the noise around them. There was chatter from nearby apartments, other people taking advantage of the decent weather, cars driving by, music playing faintly from somewhere up the street – but it was all in the background. Kurt could never see the stars when he was in Manhattan, the lights of the city far too bright to let them be visible, but there on that rooftop he could.

 

“I still can’t believe it,” Kurt murmured, leaning back on his hands and looking up at the sky. Staring up like that made him feel small, which wasn’t a new feeling because he’d felt that way a lot since moving to New York. It was difficult not to, with so many people crammed into one city. Everyone went there to try and make it, and when there was a sea of humanity all striving for success it was easy to get buried beneath it all. “Any of it.”

 

“I have trouble with that sometimes.” Blaine voice was soft next to him, floating up through the dark of the night and coming through the soft giggles echoing from the edge of the roof. “I think back to what I was doing before, try to figure out where I would be now if I hadn’t gotten that phone call, but I can’t even imagine because  _this_  is what I’m meant to be doing. I  _know_  it is. Even still, there are days I can’t believe it – that I got so lucky.”

 

“Fate,” Kurt added softly, not wanting to let Blaine off with giving all the credit to luck when Blaine always corrected him in turn. He glanced down to find Blaine looking up at him, a serene smile pulling up at the corners of his mouth. “Don’t forget fate.”

 

“Never.”


	5. Chapter Five

Not having to set an alarm didn't stop Kurt from waking up early, just like he figured it would happen. He didn't roll over to go back to sleep, though. He didn't think he could have done that if he'd tried, because he was always so awake right off the bat after years of an alarm meaning  _get your ass out of bed or you'll be late._ It was nice to be able to take his time, and he cherished that. Cups of coffee on the fire escape weren't just for the weekend. He still had a morning routine; it was just that it had changed. Showers weren't rushed, they were long and luxurious. Breakfast was more than just a hurried piece of fruit grabbed on his way out the door. There was time to take to  _enjoy_  it all.

 

The train rides to Brooklyn were easy to enjoy as well. They always had been, though before they had been filled with impatient thoughts. He'd wanted to get there faster, wanted the train to speed up so he could have more time, but once he had all the time in the world in front of him he just sat back and let himself get lost in the steady rocking motion of the car, the metal creaking heard through his headphones despite the music playing in them. The rides there were almost soothing, though the rides back were less. While he loved his apartment and his bed, having a place that was his own where he could just be, he knew the rides  _to_  Brooklyn were filled with more anticipation and enjoyment than the ones from.

 

Working with the other artists was something he'd looked forward to from the moment Blaine had mentioned it, though he wasn't sure how it would go. Being friends with them was one thing, but actually taking part in  _their_  work was something else entirely – though he supposed they might have been feeling the same about him.

 

Santana had demanded he write out a brief biography for her, but that had been it. He supposed not everything was nearly as inclusive as the others, like Brittany or Blaine where he partially knew what to expect. Brittany had wandered her way into his room the first weekday after their party, sitting on the edge of his table and watching him draw for a few minutes. It had been slightly distracting, despite how quiet she'd been, but anyone looking over his shoulder always was. He'd tried to stop to see what she wanted, but she'd told him to keep going and just watched, her blonde hair hanging down in his peripheral vision just enough to be a reminder that she was there.

 

After he'd set down his pencil, finishing out what he'd been doing in the first place to a point where she hopefully wouldn't tell him to just ignore her again, she'd taken his hand and pulled him up to his feet. It had been wordless at first, just her hands shifting his arms and hands to where she wanted them. Kurt thought he might not have appreciated the lack of information about what was going on except that it was Brittany, and the look on her face had been enough to keep him from asking any questions. It was more concentrated and focused, he would have almost ventured to say  _serious_ , than he'd ever seen her before. In the end she'd gotten one of his hands firmly placed on her back and the other in hers before she looked up at him, a soft smile spreading across her features.

 

"I'm going to teach you how to waltz."

 

That was how they ended up where they were later that week, Kurt's pants cuffed up mid-calf to hopefully keep anything from getting on them – though he'd worn an old pair that he didn't particularly mind if they got messy. There was a large piece of canvas spread across the floor, and they'd done a few run throughs to make sure he remembered what he was doing. Brittany had insisted that there should be something other than just the basic step, and while Kurt had gotten the hang of it fairly quickly he wasn't exactly keen on the thought of messing up. There was always performance anxiety when it came to something he'd never done before, and waltzing was definitely something new.

 

"Ready?" Brittany asked, carefully setting the pans of paint off to the side. The floor was littered with dried footprints, almost to the point where it looked like it was a pattern painted there on purpose. She'd claimed pink as her color for all the paintings she was doing with other people for the gallery, and Kurt had struggled to decide on a color before she'd picked one for him. _There's this blue, you should use it. It almost matches your eyes – as close as anything could ever come, I think._

 

"As I'll ever be," he replied, stepping into the paint gingerly and only wrinkling his nose a little as it squished up between his toes. Brittany looked positively blissful as she stepped into her pan and then out again, holding her hand out for him to join her. It felt like it was going against so much Kurt had known, not worrying about the fact that he was getting paint on everything – and it was even intentional.

 

They started at one corner and worked their way across to the other end, their footprints starting bold and dark and fading as they went. As soon as they ran out of canvas, cold concrete hitting their feet, they started again. Brittany had been a good teacher, but she was also just a calming presence to have there when Kurt was doing something that wasn't in his comfort zone. Her hand squeezed against his occasionally, and the smile never left her face the entire time. She looked like she was concentrating intently on what they were doing but getting lost in it all at the same time. It was like that flowed through her and into Kurt's hands were they were touching, up into his body and pulled him into her world.

 

It took a few passes across the canvas before Brittany's hand tensed around his as he started back for the paint, keeping him from going any further. Kurt glanced back over his shoulder at her, and she was just looking at him with a content look on her face as she used her free hand to gesture at the canvas.

 

"It's perfect," she announced softly, letting go of his hand to move over and nudge the paint away from it.

 

Kurt let his eyes drift over it, taking it all in. The moments in the beginning where he'd been hesitant, those were mostly or at least partially covered by steps of more confidence from the latter moments. He liked the overlap that he could see, beyond what he knew of Brittany's prior work when she was by herself. Of course there were distinctive footprints and patterns when she did that, but this was different. The different colors lent more layers than just on the surface. There was the combination, of where his feet had trod over where hers had been, the overlap of pink and blue mixed together in his footsteps for the rest of the time after that on those passes across. He hadn't realized it happening when it had been, but seeing it there after he didn't know why he hadn't anticipated it.

 

"Thank you." He looked down to where she was crouching at the corner, fixing the edge of the canvas, and she looked up at him with slightly wide eyes. It was like she hadn't expected any kind of gratitude, but getting to share something that was such a piece of her was definitely something worth thanks.

 

"Thank  _you_ , Kurt."

 

To be fair, the person Kurt had most looked forward to working with was Blaine. He hadn't been kidding when he said that to Blaine about his photography, letting him take his picture, and he knew that one by one people were being pulled off to some room Blaine had set up as a studio up on the second floor. Kurt hadn't realized that there probably wasn't an area used for that normally, considering that Blaine usually did all his work out in the city and not stuck inside. All the other photography he'd ever seen in the magazine had all been outside as well. It had come together quickly, as far as Kurt could tell, because he it was going on and was just waiting for it to be his turn.

 

It came on a night the week after. They saw each other in passing, had conversations, but ever since the discussion of the gallery the night everyone had been there, the focus had been so heavily on creating. Kurt got lost in drawing for hours, working on trying to capture what he wanted for everyone and fussing over every detail because it  _had_ to be perfect. It wasn't just his work on the line, though that was enough to make him worry, but it was also that he was working on representing someone else with it and  _that_ was close to being a terrifying thought. So it was a welcome interruption when Blaine knocked on the doorjamb, raising an eyebrow at him and offering a gentle smile.

 

"Feel like being a model?" he asked, and Kurt glanced down at himself like somehow assessing what he was wearing or looked like would change his answer.

 

"I'm kind of a mess," he replied, taking in the charcoal smudging his fingers and the sides of his hands. If he'd known he probably would have worn something nicer – he had an entire closet of clothes that would have looked fantastic in front of a camera – but from how Blaine shook his head he figured it didn't matter.

 

"You look perfect," Blaine said, his tone soft and near tender in a way that made a shiver run up Kurt's spine – a good shiver, one that he didn't mind even for a second. He gave a nod and rose from his chair, leaving everything there on the table as he followed Blaine back through the hall and to the stairs, climbing them to the second floor and weaving their way through some storage space before getting to where Blaine had set up his space.

 

"Can you take your shirt off?" Blaine asked, and Kurt stopped mid-step to look over at him with a raised eyebrow. "I just don't want to get it messy," Blaine hurried to continue, noting the hesitation and backtracking. "Sorry, maybe I should have opened with what we were doing instead of trying to get your clothes off."

 

"I—”

 

"It's just headshots, like from the shoulders up, not anything... untoward," Blaine continued, his cheeks flushed slightly. "But there's this pigment, like a splash of color – it’s all organic and harmless and kind of just like colorful cornstarch, it doesn't stain your skin or your clothes or anything like that."

 

"No, it's fine," Kurt said, shaking his head. He was sure there was already something on his shirt, despite how he tried to keep it from getting messed up, but that was why he had a very specific laundry regime. Drawing in a breath, trying not to think about the blush on Blaine's neck or how he could feel the heat of his own skin, he tugged his shirt and undershirt up over his head in one fluid movement and set them on a chair off to the side.

 

The building was always slightly on the side of chilled, but the amount of lights in that small space were keeping it warm and from being uncomfortable to have that much skin exposed. Blaine had looked away, checking the settings on his camera in the brief few seconds it took Kurt to get off his shirt, but once Kurt was standing there still, unsure of what his next move was supposed to be, he glanced back over.

 

“It’s going to be a mix of black and white and color, just to get some variety,” Blaine explained as he moved, gesturing for Kurt to follow and having him stand in front of a stark white backdrop. There was an ‘X’ on the floor so he knew where to stay, and he stood there watching as Blaine moved back to his camera to adjust the height of the tripod. “So there are colors to choose from – pretty much any color of the rainbow, take your pick.”

 

“Green,” Kurt answered after a moment. Blaine smiled, running his fingertips over an assortment of Tupperware containers sitting off to the side before picking one up and popping the lid as he walked over to where Kurt was standing.

 

“Close your eyes,” he said softly, his voice almost a murmur, and Kurt’s eyes fluttered closed automatically. The pounding of his heart was loud in his ears to the point that he was sure Blaine must have been able to hear it with how close he was standing, but if he could he didn’t say anything. Kurt stood still as he felt the pigment hit his skin, like a puff of air that lingered, and he didn’t open his eyes again until Blaine said he was done.

 

“You’ll have to tell me what to do,” Kurt told him as Blaine took steps backward away from him, eyes traveling over his skin as if examining to make sure it was what he wanted it to look like as he got closer to his camera. “I’ve never… done this before.”

 

Blaine smiled; a warm smile where his eyes sparkled that little extra and it looked like he was biting the inside of his lip to keep from it becoming a full-fledged grin. “You just stand there and look stunning like you are right now, I’ll take care of the rest.”

 

Kurt felt his cheeks flush, his gaze flickering to the floor for a moment to recover before he looked back to Blaine. It was too late for a chance to reply, because he could hear the shutter of the camera clicking. The first click had come right after Blaine had spoken, which made Kurt certain that he’d done that on purpose – said something he knew would get a nonverbal response first so he could capture it, and they had just kept going after.

 

As much as Kurt had been looking forward to it, he’d imagined it would be at least slightly awkward – and that had been before Blaine had asked him to take off his shirt. He’d never been in a position where it was just him and someone taking pictures of him other than his senior pictures, but that had been years before and he’d been posed over and over, not anything like what Blaine was doing. It wasn’t an uncomfortable kind of awkward, but awkward nonetheless, not because of the situation but more because he wasn’t sure what to do, where to look.

 

His gaze shifted, looking at the camera for the most part but also away. That was the only part that felt awkward, the staring into the lens. Blaine never told him to look anywhere specific, so he figured he wasn’t messing anything up by looking away on occasion. Besides, if Blaine was going for variety there was only so much he could get from straight on shots looking into the camera. For the most part he was given no instruction at all, at least in the beginning, even when there were pauses for the cameras or film to be changed out. Just like with Brittany, it was easy to get pulled into what was going on and not think about what he was doing, relaxing and giving himself into the moment.

 

“Can I see your hands?”

 

It was the first time Blaine had said anything since they started, and his voice cut through the otherwise silence of the room despite the fact that he’d spoken quietly. Kurt blinked, coming back to reality and glancing down at where his hands were hanging by his sides. He held them out in front of him, palms up, gaze flicking up to where he could see Blaine looking at them over his camera. There was still charcoal on them from before, smudges and shades of black and grey marring his skin, and he moved to wipe them on his jeans – they were black and headed straight for the wash when he got to his apartment – but stopped when Blaine made a noise of protest.

 

“No, that’s – they’re perfect like that,” Blaine said, shaking his head and keeping his eyes on him from over the camera. “If you want to bring them up so they’ll be in frame, I don’t want to  _pose_ them just anything that feels natural…” Not even thinking, Kurt moved one up to rub the back of his neck, and Blaine drew in a breath. “Right, like that. I love that.”

 

They drifted back into silence again, save for the camera. Kurt felt less stiff with the permission to move, though he hadn’t been forbidden to move before, he supposed, it just hadn’t felt like something he should do. He thought back to when he’d been downstairs working, the music he’d been listening to earlier, remembering the melodies and letting them play through his head as his hands drifted over his skin and occasionally up into his hair.

 

The click of the shutter gave an erratic backbeat to the music in his mind. More so than before, it was like Kurt could  _feel_  Blaine on the other side of the camera. It seemed silly, because he’d been there the whole time, but suddenly it was like he could feel him there, his gaze steady through the lens. It wasn’t in a way that made him feel uneasy, like he was being watched, but a reminder of his presence and what they were doing. The shutter sounding off was unpredictable but steady, or at least steady enough for Kurt to notice immediately when it stopped.

 

“I probably look like a mess,” Kurt murmured, letting his hands drop and looking down at them, the green pigment smeared into the charcoal. His heart was pounding again as Blaine moved out from behind the camera, slowly crossing the small distance between them, and he tried to blame it on adrenaline but he knew it was really because of the way Blaine was looking at him.

 

“No,” Blaine replied softly, shaking his head as he stopped just in front of him. “You look incredible.”

 

Kurt’s eyes stayed fixed on Blaine’s, and what only took a second seemed to happen in slow motion. His breath had caught at what Blaine had said, and he watched as Blaine’s gaze moved down along his shoulders, up his neck, flickering over all the spots of green and smudges of black that Kurt was guessing were there. He could count Blaine’s eyelashes, or at least try to, or the flecks of gold in his eyes that were catching the light in the room as they moved up Kurt’s face, lingering on his lips before meeting his eyes, then back down again as he leaned up.

 

Blaine’s lips were soft and warm against his and Kurt’s hand moved up to cup his jaw automatically, his eyes fluttering closed as he inhaled deeply, thumb stroking up against Blaine’s cheek. It was there again, that swooping feeling, but it was tenfold and making him feel like he was dizzy. Blaine’s hand resting on his shoulder, sliding up his neck and settling there just below his jaw, his thumb brushing up against it, was the only thing that kept him grounded in the moment.

 

It had been a while since Kurt had been kissed, and when it was Blaine he was kissing he didn’t want it to stop. His head dipped to chase Blaine’s when he started to pull away, catching the soft surprised sound he made and swallowing it down as their mouths slotted together easily. Blaine pressed in against him, arm sliding around his waist and pulling him in tight against his chest, and Kurt parted his lips to ghost the tip of his tongue against Blaine’s lower lip, earning a gasp from Blaine before his tongue was flicking out to meet Kurt’s and it was like they careened over an edge together.

 

Tongues slid together as the kiss deepened, exploratory and verging on desperate, but it was desperation of  _want._  Kurt wanted to know what Blaine tasted like, wanted to lick behind his teeth and learn the topography of his mouth to where he could feel it on his own. He wanted to memorize the breathy sounds that Blaine made when he was kissed hard and long, and the ones that he didn’t know he himself was capable of making until Blaine sucked on his lip in that one particular way and pulled them out of him.

 

When they finally broke apart, just to the point of their foreheads resting together and breath falling heavily between them. Kurt didn’t open his eyes until he felt like he wasn’t panting anymore, his fingers still threaded into the back of Blaine’s hair. His hand had slid back from Blaine’s jaw to rest there at some point, he couldn’t even remember when, all he could remember was the press of lips against his own and the way Blaine’s teeth had dragged along his lip and made his knees weak beneath him.

 

“Incredible,” Blaine repeated in a murmur, and Kurt’s eyes opened slowly. There was pigment and charcoal smudging Blaine’s skin, and Kurt wasn’t sure if he’d ever seen anything better. It was from his fingers, fitted against his jaw and cheek, trailing back below his ear and along his neck, and he wanted to trace his fingertips all over Blaine’s skin to see the way it would linger and stay behind.

 

“I got you messy,” Kurt whispered and Blaine’s gaze met his, eyes earnest and a smile spreading up into them.

 

“I  _really_ don’t mind.”

 

“Well then.” Kurt brought his hand up and drew the tip of his index finger down Blaine’s nose, leaving a trail of mostly green with a tint of grey. Blaine just laughed, his arm still tight around Kurt’s waist as his head tilted back, scrunching his nose.

 

“You can do better than that,” he said teasingly, thumb brushing over the apple of Kurt’s cheek.

 

“With the necessary tools…” Kurt began trailing off as Blaine stepped back, an eyebrow quirked as he gestured back toward his camera.

 

“Forget where we are?”

 

He was right, because anything Kurt might have wanted or imagined was there in that building. Kurt took a step away from him, his gaze sweeping over the area and lingering on the Tupperware containers Blaine had been looking at earlier, the ones with all the different colors of pigment in them. He glanced back to Blaine before walking over and popping open the lids to look inside at the assortment of colors at his disposal. Kurt pressed his fingers down into the green, drawing them out and tracing down his forearm with it. He hadn't been able to see where it was on his skin from Blaine's doing, but the color was bold and emerald, standing out brilliantly against his skin but without seeming bright or harsh. It was a deep, rich color and he hoped they all looked like that, though Blaine's skin was such a different shade than his but he didn't think that would make that big of a difference.

 

"You going to take off your shirt?" he asked as innocently as he could manage, and Blaine laughed again. "Fair's fair..."

 

"Fair's fair," Blaine repeated, tugging his shirt up over his head and tossing it to the side of the room before wandering over and fiddling with his camera. Kurt let his gaze rake over him, because  _fair's fair_ and how long had he been standing there shirtless with Blaine behind the camera doing nothing but look at him? He drew his lower lip between his teeth, biting it lightly as he thought about tracing along the muscles in Blaine's back, the dip of his hips, resting his hands against his arms and feeling the muscles move as he unhooked the camera from the tripod and replaced it with another one.

 

"What are you doing?"

 

"I was setting this up to take pictures continuously at intervals," Blaine explained in an almost absent way, his eyes never leaving the camera in front of him as he attached it to the tripod and adjusted all the dials to the settings he needed. "Document your turning me into a technicolor person. Come here?" Kurt moved over beside him, glancing down as Blaine nodded to the camera. "I'll go out and you adjust that so it's the right height, and then just press the button to make it start."

 

Kurt nodded, and Blaine offered him a soft smile before pressing a kiss to the corner of his mouth and ducking out from behind the camera to get to the middle of the room. His hand moved up, fingertips brushing over where Blaine's lips had just been, without him realizing it was happening. Leaning down, he adjusted the camera and reached over to get the different containers of colors before he pressed the button, hearing the shutter click and drawing Blaine's attention away from where he'd been looking at the floor.

 

Not wanting to block the shot of him, and having gotten a better idea of where to stand after looking through the viewfinder, Kurt stayed off to the side and dipped his fingers down into the purple pigment first. It was such a perfect royal purple, very much akin to the bow tie that Blaine had been wearing that day he'd been waiting outside Kurt's office, and he flicked it in at him. The pigment hit Blaine's neck and cheek, and his head tilted to the side as if it had been a punch, the camera going off just as the cloud of purple rose up off him. It looked perfect against his skin, the color dusting and dotting along it, and Kurt bit his lip as Blaine looked over at him, the corners of his mouth turned up in a mischievous grin.

 

"Bring it on," he mouthed, and Kurt shifted the containers over closer, in front of him but still out of view of the camera, stooping down to stay out of frame as he slipped his fingers into the green and tossed it against him.

 

Color by color, Blaine got covered. His hair got flecked with more purple, red dusted his arms, blue and yellow mixed low on his torso and onto his jeans. Kurt apologized for that but Blaine rolled his eyes, gesturing to the rest of himself as if to point out how much it really didn't make a difference, all things considered. There was color  _everywhere_ , not just on Blaine but the floor, the backdrop, the dust of it having drifted over onto Kurt enough that he knew his skin and remaining clothes were various tints of everything he'd been throwing Blaine's way. Blaine looked incredible, though – gorgeous and strong and like there was nothing he'd rather do in the world. His eyes were a pop of dark against the colors on his skin, and Kurt could only hope the camera caught even half of how beautiful that was in person.

 

He'd gotten stuck staring up at those eyes, which were focused on the camera for a moment, his hand stilled in the container of green pigment. That was all it took, once Blaine's gaze shifted down to him, and a second later he found himself being pulled up to his feet, the chalky taste of whatever the pigment was – organic, harmless, but not exactly great tasting – against his lips. His arms slid around Blaine's shoulders, keeping him close and feeling the press of their chests and torsos together as Blaine's arms snaked around his waist, the kisses staying closed mouthed thanks to the color but hard and lingering, and his green colored hand slid up into the back of Blaine's hair, fingers twisting into it. He felt swept off his feet but safe from falling thanks to Blaine's arms around him, the hands splayed against his back and running up his spine.

 

It wasn't until they broke apart that he heard the camera still clicking away or that he realized that his front was just as colorful as he'd made Blaine, the pigment rubbed off onto his skin and his jeans. The pictures, he didn't mind that at all and kind of couldn't wait to see what they looked like. When he'd been looking forward to working with Blaine, there was no way he had anticipated it would have ended up like  _that_ but especially not with pictures like that either. He didn't mind the color spread across him either, it was just going to make the subway ride interesting.

 

"I'm going to be that crazy person on the train," he murmured as he took a step back to look down at himself, and Blaine's hands slid down his arms to take his hands. He glanced up and straight into Blaine's eyes, one of his hands being released as Blaine pulled his away, running it up his chest and neck, cupping his jaw and offering a small shrug, and the camera kept clicking in the background. "What?"

 

"Don't be the crazy person on the train," Blaine replied, leaning up and pressing a soft, lasting kiss against his lips before he pulled back enough to whisper, "Stay with me."


	6. Chapter Six

_Stay with me._  
  
Kurt had nodded, a silent agreement before his chin dipped down and his lips pressed against Blaine's again. It wasn't like there needed to be any enticement for that offer at all, though not having to brave the subway covered in whatever colors he couldn't get off his skin beforehand was a plus. Staying with Blaine – Blaine who kissed so perfectly and looked so gorgeous and made him feel like so much more than he'd felt in years – was enticement enough.  
  
"How far do you live?" he asked in a murmur, his arms loped around Blaine's shoulders and keeping him close as their foreheads stayed resting against each other. They swayed slightly, the click of the camera the only interruption in the quiet.  
  
"Not far," Blaine replied softly, his hand cupping Kurt's jaw as he stole another kiss, lingering a long moment before ducking out of his arms and moving toward the camera to turn it off. Kurt's gaze followed him, taking in the planes of muscle in his back and how the colors were bold on his shoulders but quickly faded into nothing the rest of the way down. Once the camera was off, he reached back for Kurt's hand and glanced over his shoulder as he waited for him to take it. "Come with me."  
  
They made their way out of the studio room and to the stairs, and Kurt was beginning to lament his lack of shirt as they ascended to the third floor but considering how Blaine was in the same situation, he couldn't much complain. It was dark, just the dim light from up above that Blaine had turned on lighting their way, but Kurt hadn't seen the third floor in anything but darkness before so he didn't think he was missing too much. That was until they got to it and Blaine led him to a door, opening it and reaching in to turn on the light.  
  
It looked like an apartment to the point that Kurt almost forgot where they were. There was a bed, dresser, closet, anything he would have expected to find in a bedroom as he stepped inside. When Blaine had said 'not far' he had been expecting something up the street, not up _stairs_. There were door off to the side and he couldn't help himself from wandering over to look, his gaze sweeping over the small kitchen behind one and a bathroom behind the other.  
  
"Like I said," Blaine said once Kurt looked back over at him, lingering in the doorway and looking caught between sheepish and sly. "Not far."  
  
"You live here," Kurt replied, making the obvious statement but getting confirmation when Blaine nodded.  
  
"I'll get you a spare towel so you can shower, and find clean clothes for you to wear since I got yours all dirty."  
  
There was a pause, a moment for Kurt to think before he spoke again. A huge part of him wanted to throw caution to the wind, to tell Blaine that they could just share the shower since they both needed to wash off anyway. There was a smaller part questioning if he had somehow misinterpreted something because this wasn't something that happened to him. Except Blaine had kissed him _, many_  times, and invited him to stay. So if he was misinterpreting it was due to some serious mixed signals and he was willing to take that chance.  
  
"You can join me," he said softly, his hand resting on the doorframe leading into the bathroom. Blaine's gaze seemed to drag up his body before meeting his eyes, and Kurt offered him a smile. "If you want."  
  
Not waiting for a response, he moved the rest of the way in and opened the door of the shower to get the water started and adjust the temperature. The green that was on his hand washed off into the stream and down to the tile floor, swirling around before disappearing down the drain. Kurt watched it go as he twisted the knob to make it a little hotter before toeing off his shoes and working to get off the rest of his clothes, first his socks and then moving on to his newly colorful jeans.  
  
The hot water of the shower was welcome in more ways than one once Kurt finally got in under it, the door closed behind him to keep water from getting onto the floor. His skin had gotten slightly chilled from the air but that was gone with the steam, and he watched as the pigment washed off his chest and stomach, seeming to lace down his legs as it streamed to the floor. He ducked his head under, getting his hair wet and face rinsed, and barely heard the door open again before he stepped back from it to see Blaine moving in.  
  
Blaine was covered worse than Kurt had been, the pigment having slipped down past the waistband of his pants and boxers, dusting past what Kurt had been able to see before. He could see  _everything_  as Blaine shut the door again, even in the slightly dim lighting thanks to him not turning on the light in the bathroom and just relying on that from the bedroom. It made it feel even more intimate, and the shadows playing across Blaine's features made Kurt's breath catch.  
  
Reaching over, he took Blaine's hand and pulled him in under the water, watching as droplets made their way through the pigment on his chest and race down his torso, leaving faded tracks through the color. It looked remarkable, in a way that made him wish there'd been pictures taken of _that_  as well as everything else had been, but those thoughts were chased away quickly as he realized his gaze had followed the water drops down past Blaine's hips and to his groin and  _oh god_ was he staring? Blaine's hand left his and slid along his chest, over his shoulder and up to cup the back of his neck as he pulled him in for a kiss.  
  
It was so easy to get lost in the feeling of it all, the way their mouths slanted together so perfectly, tongues twisting together in a balance of power as hands slid against skin. Kurt caught a stream of green running down his arm out of the corner of his eye, his fingers twisted up into Blaine's hair like they had been down in the studio when he'd unintentionally worked all that pigment into his dark curls. The color waned and faded until the water ran clear, seemingly opposite of how  _they_ were going.  
  
Blaine's hands were strong and firm against Kurt's skin, fingers splayed against his side and then sliding up over his chest and neck, tracing over his skin like it was the most natural thing in the world – and it felt that way to him, too. If there were thoughts of being self-conscious, which some of those had to have been dismissed earlier when he intentionally invited Blaine to shower with him, they were in the back of his head and far from making their way forward again. Each little touch, a thumb rubbing over his jaw or fingertips trailing down his chest and stomach, sent perfect shivers down his spine and straight down his body to his toes. He could feel the way it was getting Blaine, too, hear the way his breath hitched or his body gave a little tremble. It happened the most when Kurt kissed his neck, he discovered, and that spot right at the back of his jaw was particularly sensitive and prone to making his fingers tighten against Kurt's skin.  
  
"Let me?" Blaine asked in a murmur as he pulled back for breath, his eyes blinking open to look up at Kurt, water clinging to his eyelashes before dropping down onto his cheeks. It took Kurt a moment to realize what he was asking, so stuck in the heat that had been Blaine pressed up against him – he could still feel where his hands had been before they'd pulled away, the searing press of his lips against his neck. But Blaine was reaching for what Kurt could only assume was body wash and a wash cloth, and he nodded in response because his tongue felt heavy and useless in his mouth after how it'd been sucked on just minutes earlier.  
  
The water  _had_ been running clear but that was just from what had been on the surface, because once Blaine lathered the soap onto the cloth and started rubbing it against Kurt's shoulders, there was color splashing down against the tile again. His hand pressed against the wall to keep himself steady on his feet, not sure if it was just the fact that he wanted to push Blaine back against the wall and forget about getting the rest of the way clean until he'd acquainted himself with _every_  inch of his body, or maybe the way Blaine was pressing hard against his muscles as he scrubbed at his skin. He could feel himself loosening, not having realized they were tense – but then again he spent a good deal of time hunched over a table sketching and drawing so he supposed they were always at least a little that way.  
  
"You know, I hadn't  _planned_  for you to get so messy," Blaine murmured teasingly, and Kurt squinted down through the water to give him a look as the cloth ran over his chest. "It's your own fault."  
  
"I believe someone challenged me," Kurt replied, snatching the wash cloth out of his hand and ignoring the soft sound of protest Blaine made. He pressed a hand against his chest to keep him from stealing it back, raising an eyebrow at him. "As little as you expected  _me_  to get messy, you weren't supposed to at all. So really, I'm the one who should be doing this for  _you_."  
  
A little more body wash made its way onto the cloth before he started in on Blaine's neck and shoulders, his eyes focused in on him as Blaine's eyes closed almost automatically and his body swayed into Kurt's touch. The suds lathered against his skin and washed away with whatever pigment had been left there. His arms were strong, Kurt could remember how they'd felt wrapped around his torso, but hung limply at his sides as Kurt rubbed them with hard strokes of the wash cloth, working his way back up before gently washing his hands and letting them drop back down so he could focus on his chest and stomach.  
  
Bit by bit, his hands – both covered in wash cloth and not – made their way along Blaine's skin. Kurt massaged his back lightly as he washed it, earning a soft groan as Blaine lifted his hands to rest against the wall to keep from sinking against it from the pressure against his muscles and the knots Kurt could feel lingering there in them. Despite there not being much chance of pigment on them, he also took the time to clean off Blaine's legs. He couldn't really help himself, not with the opportunity right there and the fact that he wanted to do a thorough job, after all. It just meant that he was crouched down and kind of eye level with Blaine's ass and then his cock – which was just as hard as his own and all kind of gorgeous – and there were so many worse things in the world than that, Kurt couldn't even begin to try and think of some kind of complaint.  
  
His hand slid up the front of Blaine's thigh as he stood, the wash cloth dragging along his skin until it rested on his hip and Kurt was back to standing up straight. Blaine's eyes had been closed the entire time, but his lips were parted and looked red, though Kurt couldn't tell if it was just from how they'd been kissing earlier or if he'd been biting at them. When Blaine opened his eyes to look up at him again, Kurt thought he had his answer – because Blaine's eyes were so dark and hungry looking, pupils blown wide and barely any of that sparkling honey-whiskey Kurt was so used to seeing there. It was enough for him to drop the cloth entirely, fingers curling around Blaine's hip and pulling him in as a barely audible plea of 'please' whispered and echoed against the tile.  
  
Their mouths met in a heated kiss and Kurt pulled Blaine in against him as he was pushed back against the smooth wall. It was cool against his back, which was a nice contrast to how the rest of his body felt like it was searing hot – from the water, from Blaine’s hands running over his skin, he didn’t know what the cause was he just knew how he felt. Despite the overarching desire behind it, Kurt couldn’t help but smile against Blaine’s mouth because somehow it managed to be sweet at the same time, the soft brushes of lips between grazes of teeth and flicks of tongue.  
  
His hand moved in from Blaine’s hip, fingertips ghosting through the slickness of the suds still on his skin and across the soft skin of his groin, making his own breath hitch right along with Blaine’s as they brushed against the base of his cock. Blaine let out a shuddered breath against Kurt’s lips when his fingers circled around him, and Kurt bit at the inside of his lip as he drew his hand up in a tight circle, taking in feel of him against his palm and fingers, his hand twisting a little automatically and his thumb brushing up over the tip.  
  
“Oh _, Kurt_ ,” Blaine whimpered, his hand pressing into the wall beside Kurt in an attempt to steady himself. Kurt could feel Blaine’s fingers flexing against him where his other hand was resting on his jaw, could see the little gasps being drawn in before there were fingertips trailing down his chest and making his muscles jump in response as Blaine’s touch moved over them. His head tilted back against the wall when Blaine’s fingers ran lightly along the length of his cock, a quiet whine catching in his throat.  
  
Blaine’s hand was sure and strong around him, and Kurt was glad for the wall because his knees kept feeling like they were going to buckle. Every touch and sensation felt amplified, and his body was thrumming with adrenaline and pleasure to the point that he was surprised he wasn’t physically trembling from it all. He brought his free hand up to cup the back of Blaine’s neck and draw him closer, and his fingers twisted into his hair as Blaine rest his temple against Kurt’s jaw before letting his head dip down and mouth at his neck.  
  
He could feel the water dripping down his skin, the way Blaine’s tongue flicked out to catch a droplet here or there, but mostly the way Blaine’s lips pressed against him, his teeth grazing just a little and almost always in response to the way Kurt was fisting over him in steady strokes. They were pressed together close enough that Kurt could feel Blaine’s shuddered breathing more than he could hear it, the ragged rise and fall of his chest that matched his own almost perfectly with how his breaths were panting out into the steam of the shower. His knuckles grazed against Blaine’s stomach, feeling the muscles there spasming in an attempt to keep control, and he swallowed thickly with a hitch in his breath, a slight sense of wonderment washing over him that  _he_ was doing that.  
  
It wasn’t as if Kurt hadn’t been in relationships before, he had. He’d dated, had boyfriends, had sex, but Blaine was different. Maybe it was because he’d been this beacon in Kurt’s life, even before Kurt had realized it. After all, the one thing in his life that had kept him connected to art had been Synergy – the publication that he looked forward to getting in the mail and had always spent so much time pouring over because it was a reminder of what he loved, what he wanted. It had been that bright spot that he needed and Blaine had been the whole reason it existed in the first place. He didn’t think it was coincidence that he’d ended up there – fate, also fate – but it was Blaine who had made him want to stay, who had gently pushed him to believe in what he was capable of doing, and Blaine whose hand was twisting over his dick so perfectly that it made him give a soft cry, fingers tightening in his hair.  
  
“Oh m’god,” Blaine moaned against the crook of his neck, and Kurt’s body shuddered in response. He could feel how close he was, the way heat seemed to pour from his limbs and down low in his groin, muscles weakening in their resolve to let him keep control, and Blaine didn’t seem to be that far off either. His hips jerked erratically as Blaine stroked over him and it only took a few touches more before he came with a broken moan, back arching off the wall and his hand stuttering in its movements against Blaine just briefly before beginning again.  
  
There was still white sparking up behind his eyes when Blaine came, his muffled cry still managing to echo against the tile. Kurt slumped back against the wall and stroked him through it, his fingers loosening once he started to soften in his hold. His heart was racing hard and his legs felt like jelly as Blaine leaned up, pressing a kiss to the corner of his mouth. He tilted his head, catching Blaine’s mouth and kissing him – slightly off center yet somehow perfect all at once – as his fingers loosened his hold in his hair, sliding down to rest against the crook of his neck.  
  
Blaine’s arm slid around his waist to pull him away from the wall and back under the water, letting it spray against them as he tilted their temples together to keep it from hitting their faces. They swayed slightly, like they were dancing to music that wasn’t there until Blaine hummed softly, and Kurt smiled, turning his head just enough to be able to brush a kiss against his cheek.  
  
The wash cloth was retrieved before the water started to turn lukewarm and Kurt’s eyes fluttered closed as Blaine made a final pass over his body with it, keeping a hand pressed against the small of Kurt’s back as he cleaned the come from his stomach. His legs didn’t feel less unsteady when Blaine ran the cloth over them – if anything, they felt even more so – but it didn’t take long before the water was off and they were out of the shower. Blaine found a spare towel that was huge and soft, and Kurt kept it wrapped around his shoulders once he was dried from head to toe.  
  
"Here," Blaine said, knotting his towel around his hips as he stepped back out into his bedroom. Kurt followed, and watched as he picked up some folded clothes from the corner of the bed and held them out. "I know they won't fit perfectly, but they should do."  
  
He was right on both counts. The sweatpants came up short, even with how they hung low on his hips, and the t-shirt was tight across his chest and shoulders, a sliver of his stomach peeking out in the gap between the bottom of it and the waistband of the sweatpants. They were comfortable, though, worn and soft in a way that made Kurt feel like he could curl up and sleep easily – but that might have also been thanks to how his skin still felt like it was radiating the heat from the shower, and how his body felt loose and sated.  
  
Kurt moved back into the bathroom to hang up his towel as Blaine got dressed, taking his time to take a breath and let it all sink in. He glanced into the shower, a soft smile playing across his features as he looked over the tile, seeing the lingering residue of color in the occasional tint against the white. Considering how covered they'd been, it was surprising there wasn't more – but then again, the water had been running for a long time.  
  
"I don't know what side you usually sleep on," Blaine started quietly as he came in to hang up his towel, his hair tousled and curlier than Kurt had ever seen it before. He was wearing pajamas of his own and looked beyond cuddly, and it only took Kurt a moment to realize that he probably  _could_  cuddle him, which brought him back to the question.  
  
"Oh," he replied, running his hand through his hair. It had been long enough since he'd last shared a bed with someone that he wasn't sure he had much of a preference. "Left."  
  
"Perfect."  
  
Blaine took his hand and Kurt laced their fingers together as they walked back out, the bedcovers getting turned down before Blaine reached over for the light switch. There was enough residual light still to see to get into bed, and Kurt sighed contently as he slid under the covers and rolled onto his side. The bed dipped as Blaine joined him and once they were both cocooned in, Kurt reached his hand up to trail his fingertips along Blaine's jaw.  
  
It was like an anchor, a confirmation that it was real – Blaine was real,  _they_  were real, what his life had become was _actually_  real and happening. His hand paused with his thumb pressed against Blaine's jaw, fingers touching beneath it, and his eyes fluttered closed a brief moment just to listen. Everything sounded different than what he was used to at his apartment – different city noise, building noise, the breath and heartbeat of someone next to him.  
  
"Kurt?" Blaine's whisper broke him out of his thoughts and his eyes opened slowly to look over at him in the darkness. He could feel himself fading, sleep tugging at him and begging him to relent, and he managed a questioning 'hmm?' in response. "I'm so glad you stayed."  
  
"Me too," he murmured, eyes closing again as Blaine took his hand from his jaw and held it down against his chest, leaning in and pressing a soft kiss to his lips before letting out a tired sigh and staying just like that, knees touching and lips almost brushing, hands clasped between them. It dawned on Kurt, right before he dozed off completely, that he didn't think Blaine meant just that night, but all he could do was repeat himself in a sleepy mumble because it was the same no matter how Blaine had meant it.  
  
"Me too."


	7. Chapter Seven

Waking up happened with a start, and Kurt wasn’t sure if it was just because there was someone else there or because it was because everything felt so unfamiliar. The mattress, sheets, blanket on top of him, all of it was different than what he was used to feeling, though he supposed he never really thought about it consciously. But there he was, so aware of the way the sheets felt against his skin and how the blanket was heavier than the one on his bed. More than that was how he’d resituated during the night and was curled in against Blaine’s side, his arm draped over his waist.  
  
He could feel each deep breath that Blaine was taking in, the rise and fall of his diaphragm, and feel the warmth radiating from him. Blaine’s arm was over his, fingers laced together lightly but almost not at all from how they’d shifted in sleep. It was enough to remind Kurt of how the night had ended, their fingers intertwining as Blaine led him out of the bathroom and toward the bed, and that was how they’d ended up the way they were. Of course thinking of that only led Kurt to think back more through the timeline of the previous night, and that made a smile turn up the corners of his mouth.  
  
Leaning in, just enough, he pressed a soft kiss against Blaine’s cheek. The more he replayed the evening before, the more he realized that he was entirely free. Of course he’d been freed from the restraints of his job and the responsibilities therein, and he’d felt that freedom for as long as he’d had it. But everything that had happened with Blaine, the photo shoots and everything thereafter, it was the first time he’d let himself be free completely – playful, maybe even teasing – without stopping to question or think anything through to the point that he could rationalize his way out of it. It wasn’t like he’d wanted to do that, either.  
  
“G’morning,” Blaine mumbled, his voice sleep rough and barely audible. His fingers flexed against Kurt’s and grasped onto them a little better, and Kurt murmured the same against his cheek where his lips were still resting. He was just so _comfortable_ and warm, which were two words that he’d long associated with Blaine in general so it shouldn’t have been surprising that was what it was like to wake up next to him. “Sleep okay?”  
  
“Perfect,” Kurt murmured in response, kissing against his jaw lightly before pulling back to rest his head on the pillow and watch as Blaine blinked his eyes open and turned his head to look at him.  
  
“My hair is a mess,” Blaine replied, and Kurt’s eyes flickered up to it briefly as a little grin took over his features. It was curlier than he’d ever seen, but it wasn’t like his own hair was anything to brag about, he was sure. Showering and sleeping on it, that wasn’t bound to give him the same results as the usual measures he went to – but he wasn’t concerned considering that he and Blaine had shared so much already, what was a little bed head on top of it all?  
  
“I like it,” he offered with a little shrug, pulling his hand away to bring it up and rake through Blaine’s hair, pushing it back from his forehead. It was soft and all kinds of crazy curly, but it had a lot of character. Clearly Blaine normally went to great measures to keep it tamed, and Kurt couldn’t blame him because he knew he would do the same, but he wasn’t lying when he said he liked it. “It’s cute.”  
  
Blaine wrinkled his nose slightly and rolled over, nudging Kurt onto his back and letting their bodies overlap just enough that his leg was hooked between Kurt’s and his arm was over his chest, hand resting on his shoulder as he propped himself up to look down. “You’re just being nice,” he said, leaning down and pressing a short but firm kiss against Kurt’s mouth. “But thank you.”  
  
They could have stayed like that forever, as far as Kurt was concerned. There was something so reassuring about warm, solid weight pressed against him and the way he could feel Blaine’s heartbeat from where his chest was resting against his side. Their breath mixed, the steady inhale and exhale between them as they made their way toward being completely awake. The sun was streaming in through the window but Kurt had no idea what time it was because he only knew how to tell that from his own apartment based on how much the sunlight was bothering him. It couldn’t have been that much later than he was used to, he was sure.  
  
“What do you have planned for today?” he murmured, tilting his head to the side as Blaine pressed a light trail of kisses along his jawline.  
  
“Good question,” Blaine replied, his voice soft and still a little gravelly from where it was back near Kurt’s ear. “I was probably going to develop the film from yesterday.”  
  
“Can I watch?” Kurt asked, the words coming out before he even registered them. He supposed it wasn’t the strangest request, but he really  _was_ interesting in seeing Blaine at work even more. It was bound to be different, more of the technical side than when they’d been out in the city for him to take pictures of his series or in the studio the day before, but it was still something that Kurt wanted to see. Blaine just took such care with everything he did, and the way he’d spoken before about developing his own film had been more than enough to pique Kurt’s interest.  
  
“Sure.” Blaine propped himself up again, a soft smile breaking across his features as he looked down at him. “I can’t promise it won’t be boring, but you can if you want. I just need caffeine first.”  
  
They made their way out of bed after many more minutes of lazily staying there, exchanging gentle kisses, and Blaine fixed his hair and got dressed before Kurt had much of a chance to even try to put himself together. “I’ll go get us coffee,” he said as he slipped on his shoes, leaning down to kiss Kurt’s forehead. “You can stay here since your normal clothes still look like a rainbow exploded on them.”  
  
“Do you know my coffee order?”  
  
“Of course I do.” Blaine gave him an indignant look like he couldn’t  _believe_ Kurt had the audacity to ask such a ridiculous question, and then he ducked out the door and all Kurt was left with was the sound of his footsteps going down the stairs – loud at first but quickly fading the further down he went.  
  
It gave Kurt a chance to look at the apartment much more in depth than he had let himself the night before. He tried to keep from being nosy, but he  _had_ to look at least a little. The kitchen was stocked well enough for a guy living by himself, the closet organized by color, and there were more bow ties than Kurt ever would have imagined there would be. It was all tidy and neat, right down to the way all the different pairs of shoes were lined up along the bottom of the closet. He found it fascinating that he hadn’t ever known that Blaine – or anyone, for that matter – had lived there, but then again he hadn’t even ventured up to the third floor for the first time more than a week prior.  
  
After brushing his teeth with a spare toothbrush Blaine had found, Kurt tamed his hair enough to feel okay with it, considering he didn’t have his usual products, and wandered down the stairs to get to the first floor and retrieve his things from his room. His bag had been left there overnight, which wasn’t too much of a concern considered that the door had been locked, but he also got a sketchbook and some pencils to take back upstairs with him when he went.  
  
He paused on the second floor on his way back up. The floor was cold against his feet, but he wandered over to the studio Blaine had set up for his photo shoots. It was just as much a mess as Kurt had remembered, and he leaned down to scoop his shirt up off the floor before pausing. There was such an aftermath from what they’d done, colors everywhere and only slightly smudged from how the pigment had originally fallen thanks to their feet. For the most part it was just how it had been, with the added bonus of footprints tracking it out of the eye of the storm and off to the camera, off toward the exit.  
  
Kurt slung his shirt up over his shoulder and flipped open to a blank page of his sketchbook. It would have been easy to get one of the camera and take a picture of it, but those weren’t his and he felt like it would have been trespassing to do. His hand moved quickly once it had a pencil in it, drawing out a vague backdrop of the room before delving into the colors. It was difficult to translate onto paper, and he knew he couldn’t get it exactly but he wanted to at least try. He figured he could always go back and add more detail or use it as a reference for an actual piece, but the important part was to get the basics there on the page.  
  
By the time Blaine was back with the coffee, Kurt had made his way back up and settled on the bed, flipping through the pages of his book and taking in what was there. It was the one he usually carried with him so he had something to do on the train rides back and forth, so it wasn’t like it was full of what he was working on for the gallery or anything else, but more like doodles and practice to keep himself occupied while he commuted. That didn’t mean it wasn’t good to look at, though, and he could see the way he’d progressed the further back he got into it.  
  
“Medium non-fat mocha,” Blaine announced, handing the cup to him and taking a sip from his own. “Sorry, there was a much longer line than usual.”  
  
“It’s fine,” Kurt replied with a slight smirk, shaking his head and flipping his book shut before taking a drink. It wasn’t like he’d been on edge from lack of coffee, which was a way he could tell it wasn’t possible for it to be  _that_ late into the morning, and he’d been keeping himself occupied well enough. “But I know how we can make it better.”  
  
They gathered everything they would need for a light breakfast – Blaine apologized for his lack of having anything better than cereal for it, but Kurt pointed out that it really didn’t matter considering that he usually ate toast – and Kurt led him up to the roof. It wasn’t exactly the same as a fire escape, but it would do well enough. They spread out a blanket and settled sitting on top of it, cereal and milk poured into bowls between them.  
  
“I don’t think I’ve ever eaten breakfast up here,” Blaine mused, taking a bite of his cereal and glancing around the roof as if he’d never quite seen it before. “We usually only came up here at night.”  
  
“It’s my favorite way to have it,” Kurt said, cradling his cereal bowl in his lap as he looked over. “Well not up  _here_ , obviously, but out on my fire escape. It used to just be on the weekends, but now… I just really love taking in the morning.”  
  
There was something to be said about being able to take in the sounds of the city from on high, not having to see any of it but still feeling immersed in its culture and life. It was something that they got all the time without realizing it, because there was no way to shut it out entirely, but it was different in the mornings somehow. It wasn’t just the sirens bleeding through the walls of his apartment, or the incessant honking of car horns doing the same. It was him giving himself into it willingly, wanting to hear the noise and rhythm of the world around him as he started his day, connecting himself to it before he walked out his front door and joined in.  
  
Those were the kind of things Kurt wasn’t sure if he would ever be able to put into words, but he felt like if there was anyone who would be able to understand, it was Blaine. And even if he didn’t get it in the exact way that Kurt had meant, he was almost certain to in his own way, with what it meant to  _him._ He figured one or the other had happened after Blaine stayed quiet for a long moment, silently mulling over bites of cereal and sips of coffee before giving a nod and replying with a soft smile. “I love that.”  
  
They stayed up on the roof long after the cereal and coffee was gone, Blaine’s hand sliding over palm up and Kurt slipping his own into it easily. Brooklyn sounded different than Manhattan, but it was in the ways Kurt had become used to seeing and hearing it. It was nuanced, and maybe it was just that way to him because that was how he felt about his experiences there in general.  
  
Kurt washed out their cereal bowls once they were back inside, nudging Blaine out of the kitchen when he tried to take over. He figured it was his job, after all, despite the fact that Blaine hadn’t made him breakfast or anything but he’d gone to get coffee and Kurt had eaten his food, so it made sense in his head. As soon as they were washed and dried, the bowls tucked up into their cupboard and the spoons in their drawer, Blaine slipped his arms around Kurt’s waist and pulled him in close, raising an eyebrow with a slightly goofy grin tugging at his lips. “So. About this you wanting to spend time in a darkroom with me thing…”  
  
It was in the farthest corner of the second floor, with a sign on the door that said ‘hello!’ until Blaine flipped it over where it read ‘come back later.’ After letting them in through the slight airlock of dual doors and double checking a few bottles over on a counter, Blaine ducked back out to get his cameras to bring in. Kurt let himself wander without touching anything, because he wasn’t at all familiar with film processing and he didn’t want to touch something he could possibly mess up. It didn’t take long for Blaine to come back with cameras and a chair in tow.  
  
“I figured you might want to sit,” he explained, shutting the door behind him and setting down the chair. “Like I said, it could be boring.”  
  
Kurt moved the chair over closer to the counter where Blaine stood, winding the film in both the cameras, and settled down into it. The room seemed so normal until the lights turned off, and Kurt blinked a few times as his eyes tried to adjust to the darkness. It wasn’t like he’d forgotten it was a darkroom, but after living in New York for so long where no place was ever completely dark, he’d not quite remembered how dark  _real_ darkness was.  
  
Blaine talked through the process of getting the film rolled onto the real and down into a light-trap tank, one for the color and the other for the black and white, flipping on the safelight once it was all protected from being ruined by it. It really was a process, Kurt realized, watching as Blaine moved around the room and got different bottles of what he could only assume were chemicals. He could see the concentration on his face, despite the dim red light of the room, and he leaned back against the chair as he watched.  
  
It was definitely its own form of art, and Kurt felt like he was transfixed. Blaine was mostly quiet, though he occasionally hummed to himself while he went through all the different steps, pouring from a bottle into the tank and then back out after a few minutes, rinsing the film, and then getting another bottle and doing it again. Everything got done twice, with the two different reels of film, and Blaine took the film out once it was done and carefully hung it to dry.  
  
“Did I put you to sleep?” Blaine asked, washing his hands and drying them on a towel before moving over toward Kurt.  
  
“Not even close,” Kurt replied, reaching up and resting his hands on Blaine’s waist when he got close enough. “I’ve never seen that done before, it was interesting.”  
  
“Well we have to wait for it to dry before I can make any prints." Blaine cupped Kurt's jaw in his hands and let his thumbs rub over his cheeks slowly. "But thankfully it's pretty dry in here so it usually only takes forty-five minutes, tops."  
  
"What do you usually do in the meantime?"  
  
"Oh any number of things, but right now I think my best option is sitting right in front of me," Blaine replied, a teasing lilt in his voice but then his eyebrows rose, eyes widening. "I did  _not_ mean it like that, oh God, it came out sounding so much worse—”  
  
"Blaine, it's fine—”  
  
"I just really wanted to kiss you, that's all I meant," Blaine babbled on, his thumbs caressing across Kurt's cheeks a little more than they had been before, and Kurt reached up to take his hands and pull him down closer. Blaine's eyes were still wide, clearly searching Kurt's to see if there had been any kind of damage caused by what he'd said, but Kurt just slipped a hand around to the back of his neck and offered him a soft smile.  
  
"So kiss me." He tilted his chin up just enough to brush their lips together, and he could feel Blaine relax beneath his hand and against his mouth. His breath came out in an easy sigh and Kurt hummed in response, letting his other hand move back to Blaine's waist and draw him in even further. It was only awkward for the shortest of moments with Blaine hunched over like that, but he shifted down onto Kurt's lap, sitting back on his thighs and cradling his head in his hands to tilt it and slant their mouths together even more perfectly than they had been before.  
  
Kurt could get lost in that feeling so easily, and gladly so. It was insane to try and think that twenty-four hours prior, he hadn't known what it felt like to have Blaine's lips pressing against his. He hadn't known the taste of Blaine's tongue in his mouth, the feel of Blaine's teeth grazing over his lips, jaw, throat, anywhere, really. It was crazy to try and think of a time where he didn't know how much the room would feel like it was spinning around him because Blaine had this way of humming into his mouth and the vibrations went straight through him all the way to the tips of his toes and the ends of his hair. How Blaine's fingers were long, gentle, and his hands strong and when they held him, it made the world feel like it was moving in slow motion. It was like it would take every ounce of imagination in him to try and fathom what it was like to know a world where Blaine didn't kiss him, didn't touch him in a way that felt like his skin was sizzling in the wake of it, and that imagination would be so much better put to use in other ways.  
  
On the flip side, he couldn't remember what it was like to not know the fit of Blaine's jaw in his hand, the way the light stubble on his cheek would graze against Kurt's palm and send a shiver up his spine if it brushed against his own cheek. How his skin was soft and warm, in a way that Kurt had thought it would be but never quite imagined to its fullest. He knew what Blaine felt like under his hands, how  _every inch_  of his body felt beneath his fingers. He'd spent enough time unintentionally mapping out his muscles and tracing along tendons that he felt that if he wanted to draw him from memory, he could. Maybe he would. All he knew was that with Blaine sitting there with him, he couldn't even being to imagine what it had been like not to have that at all.  
  
"So you're not bored with this whole process yet?" Blaine murmured as he nosed his way back Kurt's jaw, mouthing at the hinge of it before pressing a soft kiss against it and pulling back to rest their foreheads together. "I mean, there's a bit of waiting involved before anything actually happens."  
  
"I think the waiting's my favorite part," Kurt whispered in response, brushing their noses together before pressing a tender kiss to the corner of his mouth.  
  
The dim red light in the room was the only thing keeping them from pitching into complete darkness, and maybe that was what made it seem all the more intimate. He could see Blaine clearly, especially that close, but the color illuminating his features brought them out differently than Kurt was used to. It was a bit like the night before, all the different colors spread across his skin and drawing Kurt's attention to different juts of bone, dips of muscle. He was almost certain that there would never be enough instances or ways to look at Blaine that he would ever run out of things to notice, from how his eyelashes fluttered just so in the light and the shadows fanned across his cheeks, or that particular way the corners of his mouth turned up when he was fighting a smile.  
  
"I love the waiting," Blaine said softly, and Kurt let his head loll into his touch as Blaine brushed light kisses along his face. "But I really want to see the pictures."  
  
Blaine had been right about the room being dry, because by the time he shifted back off Kurt's lap and got up to check on them, they were ready. There was a good bit of preparation that went into getting everything ready to make the prints, as well, and it might have been boring if Kurt hadn't been watching Blaine so intently. He had such an ease about everything that he was doing there in the darkroom that it drew Kurt in, and it vaguely reminded him of watching Brittany dance when she'd been demonstrating different steps for him. Blaine _flowed_  through all his movements, like he had developed this dance with his equipment that was so routine that it was effortless.  
  
There were so many elements and Kurt wasn't even sure what they all were. There were many tubs of different liquids, papers stacked off to the side next to what he would have called a projector even though he doubted that was the right term, a timer, and who knew what else there was but he couldn't see it all in the darkness. He set his sketchbook on his lap and flipped open to a blank page, trying to keep the movements of his pencil as quiet as possible to keep from disturbing Blaine – hell, he didn't even know if he would have been able to if he tried with how much Blaine seemed to be in his own world. It wasn't like Blaine had forgotten he was there, Kurt knew that, but he had to wonder how often he had anyone else there in the room with him when he was doing anything like that.  
  
Kurt watched as Blaine held the negatives up to the light, essentially scrolling through them until he came across one he seemed to like and then the process began. Without knowing the proper terms, which he didn't because he'd never done much with photography that wasn't a digital camera, Kurt couldn't even begin to describe it. All he knew was that Blaine seemed to be projecting the negative onto a paper, watching the timer, moving the paper off to the side once he was done, and then looking through the negatives before choosing another one and doing the process all over again.  
  
That was how it went, Blaine going through his process and not making any sound besides an occasional hum of thought while looking at the negatives, and Kurt sitting there caught between watching him and looking down at his book and adding to what was on the page. Then was as good a time as any to work on his thoughts for the gallery, at least Blaine's portion of it. It helped to be sitting there with his subject right in front of him, giving him the best possible examples of how he worked and what he did. Over and over, Blaine slid a paper under what Kurt was calling the projector and made a print of the negative, adding it to the other side, away from the blank papers waiting to be filled.  
  
"I'll scan all the negatives into a computer later." It had been near silent for so long, save for the scratching of pencil and the sounds of Blaine's process, that it almost started Kurt when Blaine spoke. He looked up and nodded, thumb brushing over the page to smudge a line. "I mean, I would print them all like this but that would take  _forever_." He offered Kurt a wink as he gathered up the prints and moved them to the other counter, to the tubs of different liquids, and one by one he dipped them into each one, keeping an eye on a clock before switching between the tubs. "C'mere."  
  
Kurt pushed up to his feet, setting his sketchbook and pencil down on the chair before moving across the small distance to Blaine, loosely sliding an arm around his waist and hooking his chin over his shoulder to watch what he was doing. "So there's the developer," Blaine began, sliding a print down into the liquid as he spoke, using a pair of tongs to make sure it all got coated, and he kept explaining with each time he moved it from one to the next. "Then the stop bath, to keep the chemicals from developing it any further. The fixer, then the wash, and then..." he paused as he pulled the print out of the wash, flipping it over for the first time so they could see the side that was the actual photograph. "Voila."  
  
"Oh my God," Kurt said, not really able to stop himself. Even if he had been, he didn't think he would have.  
  
It wasn't like he wasn't used to seeing himself, because he owned a mirror for goodness sake, but he'd been so caught up in the process that he'd completely forgotten that the picture Blaine was working on was of him. He wasn't sure if it was a faux pas to love a picture of himself as much as he did that one that Blaine had in his hands, but he really didn't care. It wasn't even the  _him_ of it that he was drawn to, but the everything else. The way it was framed, the splash of pigment on his face in it – though it was black and white so he couldn't see the green, but he knew that was what it was – how Blaine had somehow caught a moment where he'd been distracted by something else so his expression was so indescribable that Kurt couldn't even figure out what had been happening. It was the same way that Blaine's pictures in the magazine captured moments that always seemed to pass by unnoticed, and despite the amount of time Kurt had spent looking straight at the camera, Blaine had caught a time that he hadn't been and he looked almost vulnerable save for the way the corners of his mouth were turning up in a way that Kurt knew was a telltale sign that he'd been about to smirk.  
  
"Was that a  _good_  reaction?" Blaine asked, tilting his head to the side so he was looking at Kurt as best he could with how Kurt was still pressed against his back and looking over his shoulder.  
  
"That's... yes. Can we do the rest?"  
  
"Sure," Blaine replied with a light chuckle, pulling away just enough to drop the picture into a part of the sink to rinse off whatever was left of the chemicals.  
  
The process repeated over and over, just like it had with projecting the negatives onto the papers in the first place. Each picture was like a revelation, frames that Kurt hadn't even realized had happened despite the fact that he'd been there, that he was the one _in_  them. That was why Blaine was who he was, Kurt supposed, and why he'd become so successful at just that. It was no wonder he wanted to develop his own prints, if it was that kind of magic every time. Maybe it was something that just seemed full of wonderment to Kurt because he'd never experienced it before, and each one was a reminder of their time in the studio, and  _God_  how he wanted to hold onto those memories forever, but he thought maybe it wasn't that because of the way Blaine's mouth was turned up in a smile that seemed to grow every time.  
  
It was when the pictures switched from being just of him to the two of them that Kurt's breath almost felt punched out of him. The first one was right when Blaine had tugged him to his feet, and he could see the mischievous glint in Blaine's eyes and the surprise in his own. Blaine had clearly known what he was doing at the time, because even as swept up in the moment as they both had been, he'd turned them just so and the camera had caught it all. From how the frame had been wider, to catch all of Blaine from the waistband up while Kurt had been peppering him with colors, the next picture showed just how flush they'd been pressed against each other as they kissed, and it was easy to see how both their mouths were turned up in smiles.  
  
The last three were probably what caught Kurt's heart the most, and he wanted to believe they'd gotten Blaine's too since he'd chosen to print them in the first place. There was one where he couldn't quite tear his eyes away from how his fingers had been twisted into Blaine's hair, the tension so clear despite how the curls were wrapped around them. That moment he'd pulled away to look down at himself, and Blaine had reached his hand up to cup his jaw – that was there in front of him, too. The way their gazes had locked, and Blaine's eyes were as gentle as his hand looked there cradling his face in it. Then what had happened moments after, that last kiss that had been so soft and tender. Kurt wanted to frame them all and put them in his apartment, and he wasn't sure if that was weird or egotistical or maybe it was neither. All he knew was that when he looked at them, his arm slid around Blaine's waist a little tighter and he didn't ever want to let go.  
  
"You didn't do any of just you," Kurt commented after all the pictures were done, and Blaine had pulled away to retrieve them from the water and lay them out to dry. It wasn't like he could have possibly had any complaints after getting to watch Blaine work like that, but he kind of did in the sense that he hadn't gotten to see any of the pictures of Blaine. He tilted his head as Blaine looked over at him, smiling innocently. "What, didn't like them or something?"  
  
"This wasn't about me," Blaine replied, setting out the last picture and giving them all a once over before sidling back over to Kurt and sliding his arms around his waist. "But how about this? We have some lunch and then you can look through the negatives and find the ones you like, and I'll print them. I mean, you could wait until I scan them all into the computer but for some reason I feel like you'll refuse to wait..."  
  
"Excuse me,  _your_ pictures deserve the same amount of gravitas as these other ones," Kurt said, rolling his eyes playfully and leaning down to brush a kiss against the corner of his mouth. "That sounds perfect. So lunch?"  
  
"Lunch," Blaine confirmed with a nod, his thumb rubbing against the small of Kurt's back. "And in return, I fully expect to see what you've been working on. Deal?"  
  
"Deal."


	8. Chapter Eight

The pictures of Blaine had been more perfect than Kurt had imagined they would be. There was just something so stunning about his features, the ease at which he'd been there in front of the lens instead of behind it – despite his comments to Kurt throughout the entire developing process that he couldn't remember the last time he'd had his picture taken, at least not in any way more than on a friend's phone or something like that. His gaze was captivating in all of them and Kurt had struggled to narrow it down as he'd looked at the negatives, wanting to see them all full size and fully developed. Except then Blaine reminded him that the negatives were going to be scanned and he could print them later, and besides, Kurt had seen how much time it would have taken to do that all so it really wasn't the best use of their time.  
  
It wasn't like Kurt could have complained about how they'd spent the time instead, pressed back against Blaine's bed while his clothes tumbled in the washer so he would be able to go home at some point. His apartment had been the furthest place from his mind as his mouth had moved over the soft skin of Blaine's neck, the tip of his tongue tracing along tendons as their legs tangled and hips pressed together, lips crushing back together in a flurry of hard and deep kisses as they rocked against the sheets and made more laundry to be done later but neither of them cared about that. How could they, when they were there like that together?  
  
After so much comfort and constant companionship over a twenty-four hour period, Kurt found it difficult to pull on his own clothes – still warm from the dryer – and think about getting on the train back home. That was why he'd lingered, lacing his shoes slowly as he watched Blaine where he was perched on the bed, scrolling through something on his phone but obviously glimpsing at Kurt from the corner of his eye the entire time. It had been a full day, and the semi-darkness of the city had already taken over outside, the street lights the only thing keeping it from feeling like complete night.  
  
"You should come with me," Kurt said, no hesitation in his voice. He hadn't even stopped to register that his thoughts were forming into words and being vocalized without his permission, but he wasn't apologetic for them. Blaine had been to his apartment before, and they'd moved so far beyond whatever they'd been before the night prior, so he didn't feel like he even had to try and start to explain. When Blaine glanced up at him, like he was confirming that he'd heard him instead of imagining, Kurt knew he didn't have to.  
  
"I'd love that," Blaine replied, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and getting to his feet, swiftly moving over to press a kiss against the corner of Kurt's mouth and linger there just long enough for Kurt's eyes to flutter closed. "Just give me a minute."  
  
The train ride was so much better with someone there to share it with, despite how much Kurt had always cherished the time to himself and the ability to let his mind wander freely without the concern for trying to engage in a conversation or keep someone occupied. Blaine was easy to be around, so it shouldn't have been surprising that it held true for there as well. They settled into a pair of seats and Blaine slid his backpack down between his feet before reaching over and linking their hands together. Kurt looked down at their fingers lacing and then over, catching the little grin playing at the corners of Blaine's mouth just quickly enough before Blaine's head was turned to take in the passengers around them.  
  
That was how easy it was the entire time. There was no conversation, just the occasional comment passed back and forth but for the most part; it was just the quiet and rock of the train on the tracks to lull them along on their way to Manhattan. Their hands stayed linked except for the times Kurt would draw his away just enough to let his fingertips trace along the lines in Blaine's palm. His hand was soft, warm, and Kurt could so easily remember the way it had felt against his skin earlier that day. It was a sense memory that he never wanted to forget, right along with the way their lips felt pressed together or how Blaine's fingernails were blunt and bit against his skin in the best possible way. The whole ride to Manhattan was full of the past day flowing through his head and keeping his mind occupied.  
  
"I would ask if you were going to make me dinner again," Blaine commented as they got off the train at the right stop, "but considering we ordered that in a couple hours ago..." He gave a light tug to Kurt's hand and pulled him toward the wall of the platform, away from the flow of people and stopping amidst it all. Kurt's brow furrowed as he glanced over to see what Blaine was doing, but he was just letting his gaze sweep over everything around them.  
  
"Blaine?”  
  
"I love this platform," Blaine said softly, his words almost getting lost from a train coming from the other direction and thundering over them. "I've only been on it a few times, but I'll always remember it how you drew it – that was the first time I saw it, after all."  
  
Kurt looked down along the platform, eyes following the yellow line along the edge and roaming over the tile on the walls, the station name written on the wall, taking it all in the way Blaine had just moments before. He'd been getting on and off at that station for so many years that he didn't even notice it, but that was what had caused him to draw it on his first day so he supposed that made sense. It felt ridiculous to think back to that day, how he'd been so hesitant and more than a little nervous or scared of what he was doing. How he felt about everything then, standing there on that platform with Blaine, it was hard to imagine there was a time that he hadn't known he could feel like that, so free and passionate about life.   
  
"Come on." Kurt leaned over and pressed a kiss against Blaine's temple, squeezing his hand. "I'm pretty sure that guy down there is about to start singing and I've heard him before, he's horrible. Unless you plan on putting him to shame..."  
  
Blaine just grinned at him before hiking his backpack up higher on his shoulder and pulling away from the wall to head toward the exit. It was different than the last time they'd made the walk together, no question about where they stood or if the evening would be lovely or verge into awkward. Blaine had been right about the dinner situation, because they'd already eaten, but it wasn't like dinner had been on the forefront of Kurt's mind when he'd made the invitation. It was more like he felt drawn toward Blaine in such a way that made him not want to be so far away, not when they'd just started to explore exactly how much they wanted with each other.  
  
"So I'm not going to lie," Kurt started as he let them into his apartment and made a beeline for his room to grab some comfortable clothes to change into, "this whole gallery opening terrifies me."  
  
"Why?" Blaine asked, his eyebrows furrowing in as he shut and locked the door, walking far enough into the small living room to be able to look back to where Kurt was. "You're incredibly talented."  
  
"You keep saying that and I'm starting to believe you with just how much you mean it, but that doesn't change the fact that the last time my art was anywhere someone could see it was my senior art show in college. This is a  _bit_ of a bigger deal than that."  
  
"You have nothing to worry about," Blaine replied, his voice calm and soothing as he dug into his backpack to grab out clothes to change into. Kurt was all the way into pajamas of sorts by the time Blaine started, and he raked his hand through his hair as he came back out of his bedroom and gave a noncommittal shrug. "You don't!"  
  
"Says the man who started this whole thing," Kurt said, waving his hand around airily as if that could somehow encompass everything Blaine had done – but there was no way to do that, there was far too much.  
  
"Hey, I just got lucky—"  
  
"Fate," Kurt interrupted.  
  
" _Fate_ ," Blaine agreed, pausing midway through pulling on a pair of sweatpants to reach over and cup Kurt's cheek, his thumb stroking against it. "You're fate, too.”  
  
They opened a bottle of wine and took the glasses into Kurt's bedroom, careful to pour into them over the nightstand rather than the bed because that could have been disastrous. Blaine sat back against the propped up pillows and let his gaze travel around the room, taking it in for the first time. Kurt had pinned up some of his drawings to the wall, the drawings from his first day over at the warehouse. He liked to think of them as reminders of what he was doing, why he was willing to put himself out there and give himself over to the art because  _that_ was what he was trying to avoid – his former place of employment, his cubicle – and the pieces of his life that had been steadfast but fallen boring and monotonous over the years – his apartment, the subway platform. It was all right there for him to see every day.  
  
"I was so scared you weren't going to come back," Blaine admitted as Kurt settled in beside him, wineglass in hand and already sipped from. "Not everyone does. Well, not everyone comes in the first place. But there you were and I'd seen your art from in college and I was just so  _drawn_  to it—”  
  
"Hardehar," Kurt broke in quietly, unable to stop himself from calling Blaine out on his pun, and Blaine nudged him in response and rolled his eyes.  
  
"You  _move_ me, Kurt," he continued, reaching over with his free hand and taking Kurt's, squeezing it softly. "You, your art, I love being able to get to see how you look at things. I know it's easy to do that with me because I take pictures and you can literally see what I was looking at, but it's not so easy with you and you give such beautiful insight into what's going on around you." He gestured up to the pages pinned into the wall, a soft smile playing across his features. "I was scared you weren't going to come back and when you did, it was like I could draw full breaths again and I didn't have to keep waiting on the edge of my seat."  
  
"You were waiting for me?" Kurt asked, letting his head tilt against the wall so he could look over at Blaine more clearly even though he knew his cheeks had to be slightly flushed from how Blaine was talking. It still didn't make any sense to him that someone whose work he'd admired for so long was even looking at his, let along complimenting it to the point of making him blush. But there was Blaine, looking so earnest and content about it all.  
  
"It felt like I was waiting for the longest time, like I was looking for you forever," Blaine replied, his thumb rubbing over the back of Kurt's hand as he took a sip of his wine. "And here you are."  
  
They were both done with their glasses before Kurt pulled out the various sketchbooks he'd accumulated over his time that he'd spent working on his arts over the past several months. Truthfully, he hadn't even realized how much he'd done until they were all sitting out in front of them and Blaine was systematically pulling them up one by one and flipping through the pages to look at every drawing. There was a lot to go through, Kurt realized, and he'd managed to set them out in chronological order -- but then again, that's how he'd had them stored.  
  
By the time Blaine got to the portfolio he'd been working out of most recently, Kurt had his hands resting over top of it and his fingers drumming lightly against the cover. It wasn't that he was opposed to him looking; it was just that what he'd been working on specifically for the gallery was inside. Considering everything that Blaine had seen, it shouldn't have been that big of a deal. It was just that the drawings weren't just what was in Kurt's head, it was also what he saw in others, the collaboration between them all to make something personal for their grand opening. There were drawings about people that Blaine knew so much better than Kurt, and about Blaine himself, and it felt like looking at them was going to expose Kurt down to the bone and leave him entirely raw. He wasn't sure if he was looking forward to it or dreading it more.  
  
Blaine raised an eyebrow and slowly slid the book out from under Kurt's hands, slowly enough to give him a chance to stop it if he wanted but Kurt knew that part of the reason he'd invited Blaine over in the first place was for that reason entirely. Kurt took their glasses and refilled them, draining what was left in the bottle and passing one back over to Blaine as he pulled out the drawings and looked at the first one. It hadn't started with the project for the gallery, just more random drawings and sketches to keep Kurt's mind busy and working as he got used to the idea of people seeing his art again.  
  
It only took a few pages before Blaine got to the heart of it, the real meat behind what Kurt had been working on for public consumption. He'd done what he could to try and capture what his colleagues did as best as possible with nothing but a sheet of paper at his disposal and whatever utensils he used to mar the blankness and craft out their genius. Some were easier than others, but that was true about most things in life. Kurt knew Brittany, had gotten to know Santana as well, and they were both wild spirits of their own right. They were so different yet more similar than Kurt might have guessed when he first met them, and he knew that wasn't just because he was aware of how much they had going on in their lives together.  
  
Brittany had been perhaps the easiest to capture, but she had also been one of the most open with him when it came to her artwork. Blaine had been the first to tell him about it, but she had invited him in so wholeheartedly and without any kind of preconception. She'd taught him to dance and drawn him so deeply into what she was doing that he'd felt lost in it. There was such passion in everything that Brittany did that it was borderline overwhelming, and Kurt knew he'd felt emotional when they'd been done with their dance in the paint, like a part of him had been pulled out and shown to the light. That was a gift she had, he had to guess, and although he knew she could have been doing great things on the stage, he was glad that she'd taken her injury and turned it into so much more rather than give herself over to mourning the loss of a career.  
  
What he'd done, or at least tried to do, was capture how each artist saw what they were doing. For Brittany, it was dancing. That was already art in itself but she made it into something more permanent. Kurt had done his best to draw that from his perspective of knowing her, watching her, and how passionate about everything she was. The page was filled with a stage, open and vast with no people on it – but footprints. There were different colors, as many as he could have used without making it seem cluttered, and they littered the stage in patterns and steps. It was the first thing he'd done after they'd finished with dancing across a canvas together, looking into different dances and studying the step patterns so he could try and replicate them in his drawing for her. The colorful footprints against the starkness of the stage was something he was proud of, which was maybe why he was so nervous about someone else seeing it.  
  
Santana was different entirely, because it had taken a while for Kurt to be able to feel out what she'd been doing when she was shut up in her own little room with a very graphic and threatening DO NOT DISTURB sign slapped on the door. Kurt had turned to Brittany to give him insight, and that was how he'd learned that Santana was working with multimedia and piecing together silhouettes of them all with fragments of what she considered to be pieces of them. That had been why she'd asked for a list of information, to be able to capture as much as she could. He'd tried to draw it as if looking down from her perspective, her hands over a puzzle that could form the outline of a person so long as she put all the pieces together correctly.  
  
Sam and Quinn had been slightly more difficult. Kurt didn't know them nearly as well as he did anyone else and it had taken a good bit of research to try and figure out what to do exactly. There had been founts of knowledge in Brittany and Santana as far as what their specific mediums were, which had given Kurt a leg to stand on when he was looking at recent issues of Synergy to try and determine who had done what, but that didn't mean he was comfortable with portraying them as individuals. As people, he knew them. They had been kind to him in his time with them all, there was no doubt about that, but there was still the concern over capturing them in a way that was accurate, fair, and flattering.  
  
Quinn had been easier than Sam, because Kurt had learned that generally she sculpted and that wasn't something difficult to portray. There was the brief concern of it seeming too Ghost-like, and he  _definitely_  did not want it to come off as anything dirty when he knew she had a young daughter who might one day look at it and realize what was going on. But after looking back over the work in the publication and walking through the storage areas in the upper areas of the warehouse, Kurt had grown more familiar with what she had done and let himself be inspired by that more specifically. He'd spent a good long time studying her hands, and that was what his drawing had been – her hands and the clay beneath them, forming something simplistic and unimportant. It was a bowl, or it could have been turned into a mug if she wanted to slap a handle on it, but the important part to him was how her fingers melded into the clay and were forming it to their will.  
  
Drawing someone molding clay was easy, but bringing movement to Sam's particular craft was difficult. For the most part he made prints, carved stamps and went to town working with colors and different types of forms on which he made his prints. Kurt could have drawn him working with the slabs of rubber, digging into them with his knife and forming an image out of nothing, but that didn't seem to give what he wanted to show. There was so much that he couldn't portray from that, but he supposed it was like that in all their various forms in one way or another. Sam carved his art on the rubber like Kurt drew on the blank page, like Brittany danced on the canvas and how Quinn saw so much more in a chunk of clay than it might have deserved from the start. That was their gift, all of them – being able to see past what was right in front of them and turning it into something beautiful and worth seeing.  
  
Kurt had remembered a specific print he'd seen of Sam's, one that had drawn his attention more than others. It had been some part of the New York skyline, the buildings shooting up over the paper like they did in real life to the actual sky, and he remembered how he'd found it so beautiful and amazing how someone could have recreated it so perfectly. So that was what he drew for Sam, that skyline that Sam had crafted beautifully. Kurt drew it intricately, down to every detail, and then at the end added in Sam's hands and the little knife he would have used to carve the buildings out of nothing. It looked like any other New York City skyline except with how Sam's fingers drifted into frame and showed how he was so adept at making that beautiful print for whoever wanted to see.  
  
By the time they got to what Kurt had done for Blaine, his entire glass of wine was gone and he was just leaning back against the pillows and letting his gaze flicker between the sketchbook and Blaine's face. More than anything, it was a rough draft. It was what he had been working on in the darkroom, so it wasn't even as though he'd been able to see what he was doing to its fullest extent. There were a few different pages, just because he'd had all that time sitting there and watching Blaine while he worked. Even more than that, he didn't think that any of the sketches on the pages were what he wanted to represent how he saw Blaine in how he saw what he was doing. They were all accurate representations of what he did when he was there developing the art that he'd created, but none of how he actually made that art. And wasn't that what it was all about?  
  
"Here, give me that," Kurt murmured, tugging the portfolio from Blaine's hands as he turned to the first blank paper past the drawings. Blaine had clearly been looking for more, or at least that's what it had seemed like, and Kurt knew he was as well. He was better than that, and more importantly so was Blaine and that meant that something else needed to happen to bring it all to life.  
  
Leaning over the edge of the bed and digging into his bag, Kurt pulled out a small case of pencils and set it between them, opening it so he could get one out and start in on the page. It wasn’t like he’d never had anyone sit and watch him before, because it had happened so many times in college and then Blaine had a little before, and Brittany too, but never like that. Never when he was specifically drawing for that one person and they were sitting right there seeing every stroke of the pencil across the page and every time he smudged his fingertip against the page to blend a line or hide something he didn’t like.  
  
The drawing formed in a way that reminded Kurt of watching Blaine develop his photographs. There were steps and a bit of waiting but then the picture was there on the page, coming into focus like it was in whatever chemicals Blaine had used and becoming sharper the longer it was there in front of them. Most of what Kurt was drawing was around the sides and the edges, doing what he could to make it look like the viewer was peeking through the lens of a camera to see what was on the other side – because that was how Blaine saw the world.  
  
Everything that he drew in the lens started out with sharp lines, just enough to show the distance between the photographer and the subjects. It was clear enough that it was a pair of people, though nondescript, and he picked out a few different colored pencils to use, adding shades, depth, and brightness to them and their clothes, hair, whatever seemed to need it but only on them and nothing to the scenery around them or the camera. Once he felt satisfied, he carefully smudged everything within the frame of the lens that wasn’t the people, making it look and feel out of focus in comparison.  
  
Blaine was doing his best not to hover, Kurt could tell, but it would have been difficult for him to achieve that considering their close proximity. It didn’t seem so much like hovering as much as Kurt could  _feel_  him watching. He tried not to look over, because he wasn’t sure if he would be able to keep his focus or be able to continue what he was doing if he saw Blaine more than just out of his peripheral. That was why he kept his gaze fixed on the page in front of him and the pencil drifting across it, adding in little details here and there until it clicked in his head that there wasn’t anything else needed.  
  
“You’re ridiculous,” Blaine murmured, and Kurt finally let himself glance over. He’d resituated, which Kurt had felt him do – but Blaine had done it so slowly and gingerly as to not jostle him while he was working – and was leaning back against the pillows at an angle so he could see the drawing better than he could have before. His glass was long since empty and just resting against his stomach, held there absently by a few fingers lingering around the stem. “God, you’re ridiculous.”  
  
“What—” Kurt started, breaking off when Blaine surged in, their mouths meeting in a firm yet tender kiss. His body relaxed into it, the tension he’d been holding in his shoulders from working and drawing released gradually with the way Blaine’s tongue stroked against his lips and then inside, and Kurt sighed into his mouth as he felt the last bit of tightness in his muscles leave.  
  
“Blaine,” he murmured, eyes blinking open when Blaine pulled back but not very far, touching their foreheads together a moment before he shifted away enough to be able to look at him properly. “What…?”  
  
“When we got here tonight, you were doubting yourself and abilities, and then you go and do  _that_? You’re ridiculous. Don’t you ever question yourself again, Kurt Hummel.” Blaine’s words may have been direct, but the sparkle in his eyes and the way he bopped his finger against Kurt’s nose for emphasis kept it all from seeming  _too_ serious.  
  
“Okay,” Kurt replied softly, leaning in to brush a kiss against his lips. “Like you’d let me.”  
  
“Absolutely not.” Blaine grinned, kissing him again briefly before moving to gather up the sketchbooks that were littered across the bed. Kurt carefully slid the drawings for the gallery back into their portfolio, adding the one he’d done for Blaine, and once they were all inside he set it back in its place beside the bed along with the rest of the books. The wine glasses stayed on the nightstand with the empty bottle, left to be taken care of in the morning because leaving the comfort of that bed wasn’t going to happen until then.  
  
It felt nice to have Blaine there with him, curled up beside him beneath the covers as they settled in for sleep. Kurt felt like he could so easily get lost in the sweet, lazy kisses passed back and forth and the way Blaine’s hand stroked against his arm and waist as if reassuring himself or maybe even both of them that everything was real. The wine seemed to have caught up as soon as Kurt laid down and it made him feel warm and a little fuzzy, but every time he felt the touch of Blaine’s fingertips, his lips against his skin, he felt pulled right back into focus. And as he drifted off to sleep, with Blaine curled in his arms, he couldn’t help but think that maybe that was just how Blaine was with everything in life, not just his photography – bringing focus to a blurry world and giving attention to what was truly important.  
  
***  
  
The gallery opening came faster than any of them had anticipated and for all of Blaine's usual blasé and optimistic attitude toward it all, Kurt could seem him wearing down to the point of stress. Then again, he'd spent a lot of time with Blaine leading up to it all – at least when they weren't working on their projects individually, but it meant that he noticed the little furrows of Blaine's brow more, the way he could get visibly concerned. It was a  _big deal_  after all, and despite the fact that there was no doubt that they were all capable of pulling together a collection for display, the question was more of whether they would meet the deadline or not. It wasn't just the collaboration pieces, after all, but also other works to display what was more normal.  
  
Kurt hadn't been back to the gallery since Blaine first took him there until they day they went to try and figure out exactly how everything would be displayed. The space had been finished beautifully, the walls stark and blank and just waiting for something to display. It was a bigger space than Kurt had remembered, but then again it looked so vast and empty, waiting to be filled. Everyone had been there that day, gathered around a scale drawing of the space and mapping out what would go where and how it would all fit and not look jumbled or crowded. Thankfully there hadn't been many issues, because with how frazzled Blaine had been looking about trying to make it all work, Kurt wasn't sure if he could have taken any turbulence on the matter.  
  
The only other time they went there before the gallery opening was when they took all the art to put up. Kurt had spent an entire day matting and framing all his drawings, taking extra care to make sure they were _absolutely_  perfect. It was one of those moments where he could feel it deep inside that he'd made the right decision, because how could he not? With all his work laid out in front of him, carefully displayed just so in their individual frames, he'd looked over it and not felt a single question pulling at him. There was no nagging that maybe he should have added a little more detail to that one, or what if that other one wasn't vivid enough? He wasn't absurd enough to say that he thought his work was perfect in every aspect, but for what he'd set out to do and what he'd wanted to convey, it was for him.  
  
Setting up all the artwork had been a daunting day, but it hadn't been as stressful as Kurt expected. There had been a truck rented to get it there, and once they'd all been there and unloading there had been music cranked up loudly thanks to Santana. Just having that in the background was enough to seem to relax everyone at least enough to get rid of any tension that might have been there before. Kurt had spent the majority of his time off in his sanctioned area, fiddling with the way the frames hung on the wall and how the lights were aimed down. It needed to be perfect.  
  
"You can go," Blaine offered when Kurt lingered once he was done, sitting off to the side to stay out of everyone's way as they kept going. He supposed he'd had it easy with hanging frames on a wall as opposed to Quinn, who was dealing with pedestals and stands and arranging her ceramics on them, or Brittany, who had borrowed Sam to help her with the large canvases she had to try and get onto the wall. "I'm probably going to be here late but I'll see you when I'm done?"  
  
"Okay," Kurt agreed, leaning in to kiss his cheek lightly and giving a little nod. "I'll go to yours."  
  
"Don't forget your suit!" Blaine called after him as he left, and Kurt glanced back over his shoulder with a playful but withering look, because as if he would have. They'd already talked about how they were going to get ready for the gallery opening together, because both of them admitted that doing it on their own seemed like a whole lot less fun. And, Kurt would have added, he was likely to be less of a bundle of nerves with Blaine there to keep him from getting that way. That was just as important as anything else.  
  
By the time he got to the warehouse, suit in a garment bag and put straight into Blaine's closet, he still had a bit of time before Blaine joined him. He'd been there when it had been empty before, of course, but never _that_ empty. It wasn't just devoid of people, but also a lot of the art that was usually lingering around. Brittany's room was just a floor filled with footprints and cans of paint off to the side, but nothing leaning against the wall as proof of why. Santana's had scraps of paper across the entire length of it, and one or two things hanging on the wall but that was it. It was almost surreal how empty it felt, and Kurt just went up to Blaine's apartment to keep from letting it get to him because it was empty for good reason but still managed to feel eerie.  
  
Blaine arrived exhausted and immediately dropped face down onto the bed after a meek greeting of  _'honey, I'm home_ ,' groaning into his pillow and becoming quite adamant that he wasn't going to be moving until absolutely necessary. It was adorable, honestly, and Kurt shifted over from where he'd been scrolling through his email on his phone to tug Blaine's shoes off his feet and roll him over onto his back so he could undo the buttons of his shirt. At least Blaine moved easily, because otherwise he was like a rag doll and his limbs flopped down against the bed one at a time as Kurt tugged his clothes off of him.  
  
"You're pretty good at getting my clothes off," Blaine murmured, reaching up to cup the back of Kurt's neck and pull him down to kiss. Kurt smiled against his lips and hummed softly before pulling back, his hand pressed lightly against Blaine's chest.  
  
"Yeah, well if you manage to move yourself into the middle of the bed, I'll give you a backrub so good you'll want to get mine off, too," Kurt replied teasingly, huffing out a light laugh as Blaine wriggled over onto the bed more and rolled onto his front again, stretching his limbs out with a contented sound.  
  
There was so much tension in Blaine's back, Kurt could feel it under his hands as he smoothed them across his skin and worked at the knots and kinks. It wasn't like Blaine had only been dealing with his own work at the gallery, but he'd put up the collections of collaborations as well, wanting to make sure they were all going to fit into their areas and that the displays would look like they'd planned them to. That was why he'd been there so late, other than making sure everyone else was doing fine, and Kurt could tell how tired and worn he was by the way Blaine seemed to sink further into the bed with every press of thumbs up the length of his spine and broad strokes of palms down his back.  
  
"Well I  _do_  want to take your clothes off," Blaine mumbled once Kurt was done and shifted off of how he'd been straddling his hips, but Blaine didn't move from how he was stretched on the bed with his head pillowed on his arms. "But I don't think I can move... and I think I might be asleep already..."  
  
"I won't take it personally," Kurt said, leaning down to press a kiss against Blaine's hair. "Just sleep."  
  
"Tomorrow." Blaine blinked his eyes open enough to look over at Kurt. "We open tomorrow."  
  
"And what a day it shall be," Kurt replied, sliding down to lay beside him as Blaine shifted one of his hands over to take Kurt's.  
  
"I'm so glad I get to share it all with you."


	9. Epilogue

There was a great deal of effort made to make it seem like any other day. It was nerve wracking enough without more attention being drawn to it. They stayed in bed far longer than they ever had even on the laziest of mornings, and Blaine had only relented into getting up because of a strong need for coffee. Kurt had gotten dressed quickly so they could go down the street to the coffee shop he'd come to be completely familiar with, and the baristas who worked there had come to know him as well since he no longer had to state his order when they got to the counter. The familiarity of that was more than welcome that particular morning.  
  
"I want to go over really early," Blaine said as they walked back to the warehouse, having gotten some pastries to eat with their coffee for breakfast – though by that point it was practically lunch. Kurt didn't feel particularly hungry, but if he didn't eat then he probably would have avoided it even more as the day went on, and that would have ended badly. "Just to make sure everything is perfect."  
  
They ate on the roof, not leaving the open air to descend back into the building until their food and coffee were gone entirely and it was clear they were simply putting off the inevitable. The two garment bags hanging in the front of Blaine's closet seemed almost ominous, just waiting for the moment they needed to unzip them and get ready for the evening. They had a while still but Kurt knew they were bound to get ready earlier than necessary, even with wanting to be to the gallery early, because of the anxiety of waiting and also in case something went wrong that needed to be fixed. What if his jacket didn't fit? Or the tie went horribly? He felt ridiculous being so worried, considering that he'd tried it all on the night before slipping it into the bag to take to Blaine's, but there was always the question of  _what if_?  
  
What kept Kurt from losing himself to his thoughts more than anything else was how in sync he was with Blaine. It was like their internal schedules regarding that day were timed out perfectly, like they both had the same ideas for what needed to happen when and just how it would go. That was why when Kurt had moved to take a shower, Blaine had just gotten there to turn on the water and the glass door of the shower was already getting fogged with steam. That was how they'd climbed into it together and taken the extra time just to  _be_  there together in that moment and let the hot water pound against their skin and wash away the tension underneath it.  
  
It was a long, glorious shower, and Kurt was glad for it. He got out of it feeling more relaxed than he would have expected to be, knowing what was ahead for the night, but even as he dried off and started to get dressed, he could still feel the warm press of Blaine's hands against his skin, the way Blaine's fingertips had rubbed against his scalp as he'd washed his hair, and how his own fingers had twisted gently into the curls of Blaine's hair as he'd lathered shampoo and conditioner into them each in turn. They'd kept each other close, almost like if they'd moved to far apart the calm that was there in the air around them would have dissipated and it would have been back to stress and nerves.  
  
That closeness remained the entire time they got ready, standing arm to arm to be able to both use the mirror in the bathroom while they were doing their hair and then putting their suits on piece by piece, side by side, and Kurt couldn't help but smile as he found himself absently straightening Blaine's bow tie just after Blaine had finished tying it. That was the moment it really hit him that they were so well in tune with each other, because as soon as his fingers had moved up to straighten the bow tie, Blaine's hands had shifted to smooth down the lapels of Kurt's jacket.  
  
They took a car over, and it was the first time Kurt had made the journey not by subway. It was very different; being able to see everything from the window of the car as opposed to ignoring what was going on around him on the train. Blaine's hand didn't leave his the entire ride, occasionally flexing against his or lacing their fingers together tighter, and Kurt just let his thumb rub over the back of his hand in response. He could feel the nerves jumbling in his stomach the closer they got, and by the time they arrived and climbed out of the car, he felt like he might throw up.  
  
"Okay," Blaine murmured, more to himself than anyone else, as he got out the keys and let them into the gallery. There was paper covering the windows still, though the Synergy logo was there on the window clear as anything, and that was enough for the feeling of  _this is real_  to set in completely.  
  
The gallery looked magnificent, polished and clean and more put together than Kurt had imagined it would when he'd left the night before. It wasn't that he'd doubted anyone's ability to put it together, it was just that it looked  _professional_ and he knew that was what they were, but he was used to the warehouse and nothing else. That space, their gallery, was more beautiful than he had been able to envision. His hand tightened in Blaine's before letting it go so he could step in further and take it in even more.  
  
"Blaine!" Kurt's head turned quickly at the sound of an unfamiliar voice, and there was a girl he'd never seen before moving out from behind the small desk sitting near the door. Blaine was smiling, which put him more at ease, and after a brief hug was exchanged between the two, the girl smiled and crossed the small distance to Kurt.  
  
"Kurt, right? Hi, I'm Tina," she said, holding out her hand and shaking his firmly once he offered it. "So nice to finally meet you in person."  
  
"Nice to meet you too," he replied, his brow furrowing slightly.  
  
"Tina handles all our media," Blaine explained, biting his lip with a light grin. "Well, she maintains our website and helped a great deal in getting tonight planned and put together as smoothly as it went. She's also who I have to constantly thank for getting you here."  
  
"I may or may not have been the person who hacked into your computer at work," Tina admitted, looking rather proud of herself. "I mean, their security was kind of easy to get through but..."  
  
"Somehow I'm not surprised," Kurt said, a smile turning up the corners of his mouth as he leaned down to brush a light kiss against her cheek. " _Thank you_."  
  
"Anyway, I was just going to start getting things ready, I need to get the covers off the windows and clean them before I can get changed," Tina went on, wandering away from them as she spoke. It sounded like she was going through a checklist in her head, and Blaine slipped his arm around Kurt's waist to pull him further into the gallery as she started in on the windows.  
  
It was like he didn't know where to look first, and he settled on taking in the arrangements of work for each artist from each other. They were at the far end of the gallery, meaning that they had to walk through everything else to get to them but he figuring working their way back to the front would work out just fine. It was surreal, seeing it all finally put together. The pieces from Brittany were clearly the biggest, stretching almost entirely from the floor to ceiling, with the other pieces arranged to the side of each. Kurt was drawn to his first, which he felt was probably natural, and he let go of Blaine's hand to stand and take it in.  
  
Santana had done an incredible job with his silhouette, taking what information he'd given her and somehow working it all in. There were pieces of everything, from fashion magazines, pictures of places in Ohio that he recognized, pieces of pencils he'd worn down and she'd asked for, scraps of fabric, all somehow coming together to make a more accurate representation of himself than he'd honestly expected. It stood out beautifully beside his dance with Brittany, below the pictures from Blaine. There were three pictures, all different in their own right. There was the first one Blaine had taken, when he'd made Kurt blush right off the bat, in black and white, the middle one in color with the green pigment standing starkly against his skin as he looked straight on at the camera, and then the last in black and white with one of his hands against his neck and the other in his hair, charcoal and pigment clearly smudged across his skin.  
  
Sam had made a stamp of the Brooklyn Bridge – he’d asked Kurt what his favorite landmark of the city was – but as if it had been constructed out of pencils instead of how it was in real life, and done a print of it. The detail of it was incredible, and Kurt found himself standing as close as he could get without touching to take it all in. Quinn had done a piece for all of them together, which Kurt had known because she'd commented how she didn't know what she would do for anyone individually but she had an idea for them as a collective. It was in the middle of that area, between all their organized representations of each other. The sculpture was simple but elegant, and it wasn't difficult to see what she was trying to convey – that they were a cohesive unit and that being there together was their own version of home. There were little instances of each of them there, easy to pick out for the knowledgeable eye but not so abstract that someone just wandering through wouldn't have been able to see it, especially with all the helpful hints of the art around them.  
  
One by one he took in the art that had been done for everyone else. The photographs were incredible, which Kurt had expected but it was different to see them done of people he considered his friends as opposed to strangers seen in passing. There was something beautiful that Blaine had been able to catch in them all, almost haunting in some, and Kurt wasn't sure if he'd ever be over the fact that he had such gorgeously talented people in his life – and that one in particular. Brittany had chosen a specific dance for everyone, and it was easy to see how they'd all so wonderfully reflected the person involved. Maybe some people would just look and see footprints jumbled together, but those people clearly weren't looking. There was his waltz, Blaine's jive, Quinn's foxtrot, Sam's salsa, and Santana's rumba, and maybe it was the bit of research he'd done for her drawing that made them stand out so clearly to him but no matter what it was, they were all right there.  
  
By the time they made it back to the front of the gallery, the windows were uncovered and sparkling clean. Tina had gone off to change, but not before letting in the people who were doing the catering for the evening – and the fact alone that they had  _caterers_  just emphasized more to Kurt that this was  _real_  and they were  _actually_  doing it.  
  
Everyone else showed up early, just like they were supposed to. They all looked at least a little anxious but incredibly well put together, though Kurt realized he'd never really seen any of them outside of working at the warehouse so of course they would look better when they were covered in paint or clay or the like. Still, there was something to be said about being covered in one's art, and even that thought alone brought a smile to his face because it made him remember that night in the photography studio, pigment filling the air and just how covered in art and each other he and Blaine had been.  
  
The first person who came in that wasn't someone that Kurt didn’t recognize was a small girl, shimmering with all the jewelry adorning her, who practically squealed as she looked around at the gallery. She looked positively _overjoyed_ about it all, and was quickly introduced as Sugar Motta – Blaine’s friend who had modeled for him in college and who had been the catalyst for Synergy starting in the first place. Her father was going to be there later, Kurt knew, and he wasn't sure if the amount he was grateful to the man could cancel out how terrified he was of meeting him. It was just the fact that he was the person who'd made everything possible and who essentially held all their futures in his hands, so Kurt figured he was allowed to be a little scared.  
  
Blaine kept his arm firmly around Kurt's waist as they waited for the actual event to start, and Kurt knew it was that need for the calmness that came from being close. Everything was set and there wasn't much they could do but wait for the clock to tick down. There were people from the business who came over to talk to Blaine, clearly the more behind the scenes entities of Synergy, but it wasn't until it was actually time for  _official_  opening that Kurt realized just how many people were there mingling around the catering tables.  
  
It seemed to move in a blur, from the moment Blaine stepped away to make some sort of announcement or greeting – Kurt couldn't even remember what was said, the way it all seemed to hit at once as soon as he lost that contact. He was still standing there with everyone else, gathered in close together like their solidarity would keep the anxiety from actually getting them. All he knew was that Blaine was his normal charismatic self, that he vaguely remembered a mention of the publication and Motta Industries (which had gotten a whoop from Sugar), and then the mass of well-dressed and incredibly professional looking people were unleashed properly into the gallery.  
  
They mingled, or at least tried to, considering that the people were there to look at  _their_  art and it was the first time anyone in Synergy had ever actually opened themselves up to being known, so there was a fair amount of curiosity. Kurt didn't know how many people he talked to throughout the night, but he did know that the first person who introduced themselves as being from a media source had caught him off guard and he'd taken a moment to recover and remember that Blaine had talked about just how much of the media that had been invited had RSVP'd that they were coming. It was the glimpse behind the curtain that many had been waiting for since Synergy started, and no one had wanted to miss it.  
  
That was what made everything go by so quickly, though far from frantic – the constant stream of people. Kurt wasn't sure he'd ever been asked so many questions about himself, let alone his work, though he was grateful for the ability to pawn some of them off on Blaine. He didn't mind answering some things about Synergy in general but he knew he wasn't the best source of material for that, and Blaine was. Besides, he liked being able to stand back and watch Blaine discuss something he was so passionate about, because if there was one thing he could talk about endlessly it was what he'd been working on building for so many years. Kurt could see the strong sense of ownership that Blaine had in what he did, what he'd  _done_ , and was glad that he was going to get the proper amount of recognition for it despite the fact that he still managed to be incredibly modest and humble about all he'd accomplished.  
  
It was just a whirlwind, and the only thing that kept Kurt from getting swept up in it entirely was the glances he would get from Blaine any time there was a moment of pause. The space seemed so small when it was full of people as it was, but somehow everyone Kurt actually knew seemed far away. It wasn't until the crowd started to thin as the night went on that he felt he could breathe properly, and he was grateful for the glass of wine he found pressed into his hand, Tina offering him a knowing smile before patting his arm and moving back to where she'd been keeping brochures and business cards organized on the top of the desk by the door.  
  
"Now I know why you didn't do this before," Kurt murmured teasingly once he'd finally made his way back to Blaine, his eyes roving over the people still there before looking over to him. "It's a madhouse."  
  
"But the  _best_ madhouse," Blaine replied, his hand pressing softly against the small of Kurt's back as he leaned up to brush a kiss against his cheek. "And only this mad for a night and then it won't be as bad and we can go back to hiding away in Brooklyn."  
  
"I really can't wait for that," Kurt said, leaning in against him with a soft smile playing across his features. "As nice and perfect as this is."  
  
"Aren't you glad you cut out from your boring job?"  
  
"I've never been more glad for anything in my life."  
  
Because as crazy as it was that night, Kurt knew he'd lucked out in everything leading up to it. Somehow he'd gotten found amongst the masses of people in the city, sought out by people who were good and welcoming, not something that was all that common in New York, and given the opportunity to do what he loved and  _flourish_  at it. More than that, there was Blaine. Being able to create artwork as he pleased and do what he wanted, that was all well and good, but he doubted he would have been anywhere near as content with his life he hadn't found someone to share it with, someone to love and be loved by. Maybe that was the luckiest part of all.  
  
And fate. Also fate.

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from 'I'da Called You Woody, Joe' by The Gaslight Anthem. Thanks to pureklaination for being my sounding board and cheerleader, and many thanks as well to whenidance for her amazing beta skills!


End file.
